Back in the 80’s if you wanted some high-quality censorship, you had to look to the Right… at least, the Christian Fundamentalist part of it. Church and parent groups freaked out about Dungeons and Dragons, and heavy metal music, and video games, and just about anything else that might be seen as fun, and those groups tried to ban or restrict them. Starting in the 90’s, though, the censorship pendulum began to swing *hard* the other way and for decades we’ve been dealing with power-mad Leftists trying to scrape society clean of the things they don’t like.
The “progressives” have had their shot… and they pushed too hard. Now it appears that on local and some state levels, right-wingers are pushing, with some success, for censorship of their own. So far, these are efforts to ban schools from mandating or even having certain texts. In many cases, these make sense: the drive to get rid of fraudulent racist agitprop like CRT and 1619 Project stuff. For the same reason children aren’t allowed to wander into R-rated movies, children should be guided through controversial or difficult subjects, and schools should *not* be teaching factually flawed topics, never mind factually flawed topics designed to psychologically harm the kiddies.
And in many cases, the individual works being banned are only faintly relevant, but it is understandable why they’ve been targeted. For too long the progressives pushed too hard; I suspect history might well show that “Drag Queen Story Hour” was the point where a whole lot of parents said “ok, I’m done pretending, that’s too much perversion for me,” and decided to just sweep the decks of anything remotely resembling that sort of nonsense. And in some cases, the books being banned don’t make any sense whatsoever apart from someone having simply read the title or done a keyword search.
The pendulum has not of course fully swung. These right-wing efforts are aimed at keeping these books from the libraries of publicly-funded schools. Progressive censorship, on the other hand, is aimed at preventing their targeted books from being published *at* *all,* to maintain a grip on the entirety of permissible thought. “Yeah, but both sides” does not really apply here given the massive disparity in goals and reach; let’s not forget that it was BLM that burned book stores.
There are limited hours in the day, and in the school year. There are subjects that schools should teach, and skills and knowledge that they *need* to impart. And then there are things that would be *nice* to teach, time and resources permitting. And then there’s “what the hell is this nonsense” that there’s really no good place for in school.
