Liberals can’t fight censorship with one hand while enabling it with the other

I recently read Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe’s best-selling memoir about coming of age as a nonbinary person. It’s an honest and forthright portrayal of the challenges facing sexual minorities in our society. I’m outraged that so many schools and libraries have banned or restricted it.

But I’m also outraged that some libraries and bookstores have banned Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage, which attributes the rise of gender surgeries among young women to “social contagion” — that is, to the messages these women are receiving — rather than to their inherent identities.

That’s how I differ from some of my fellow liberals, who scream bloody murder about restrictions on books they love but seem perfectly happy to remove ones that they loathe. I understand — and, in many ways, share — their distaste for Irreversible Damage. But you can’t fight censorship with one hand if you’re furthering it with the other.

Consider the kerfuffle earlier this year in Blue Hill, Maine, an affluent, left-leaning community with a well-endowed public library. When the library accepted a donation of Irreversible Damage and placed it on display, residents posted angry messages on Facebook and accosted the library’s staff at the local post office and grocery store.

“They would say, ‘I can’t believe the library is allowing this,’” the library board president recounted. “My feeling was, ‘I can’t believe the library would not allow it, based on its position on free access to information.’”

I can’t believe it, either, but it’s happening. When it comes to free expression, even liberals have become illiberal.

That includes the American Booksellers Association, which proudly touts its anti-censorship bona fides. A sponsor of Banned Books Week, an annual event that proclaims “the value of free and open access to information,” the association issued an abject apology after it sent Irreversible Damage to 750 bookstores in 2021.

“An anti-trans book was included in our July mailing to members,” the American Booksellers Association declared, noting the “pain” and “harm” it had caused to the trans community. “This is a serious, violent incident that goes against ABA’s policies, values, and everything we believe and support. It is inexcusable.”

Here’s what’s inexcusable: An organization ostensibly devoted to the “freedom to read” closed the book on it. According to illiberal liberals, you should be free to read what they like. Everything else is off the table.

So in the wake of the George Floyd police murder in 2020, the resolutely leftist school district in Burbank, Calif., barred teachers from assigning To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, on the grounds that these books (which both use the N-word) cause “harm and trauma” to Black students.

Never mind that many leading Black authors — from Langston Hughes to Toni Morrison — have praised Huck Finn, which indicted American slavery and racism. These books threaten young readers, the argument goes. We can’t allow that.

And never mind that conservatives have invoked the same argument to ban Gender Queer and other LGBTQ-themed books. In Cumberland, Maine — just a few hours down the coast from Blue Hill — a parent read several passages from Gender Queer to his school board and demanded that it be removed from the school library. “That’s what our kids are seeing, and you’re OK with that?” he asked, calling the passages “pornographic.”

Thankfully, the Cumberland school board retained Gender Queer for its high school library. And I’m also grateful to report that the town library in Blue Hill stuck to its guns and held on to Irreversible Damage.

But it got no help from the American Library Association, another sponsor of Banned Books Week. When the library’s director reached out to the ALA for a letter of support, he said, it “ghosted” him.

To her credit, the director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom privately apologized to him. She also told reporters that she opposed using “the tools of the censors” against Irreversible Damage. But there would be no official statement of support from the ALA, where the book had sparked considerable “internal debate.”

Either you believe in intellectual freedom, or you don’t. If you do, you’ll defend books that you find harmful or offensive.

That speaks volumes, in its own right. What’s to debate, really? Either you believe in intellectual freedom, or you don’t. If you do, you’ll defend books you find harmful or offensive. And if you don’t, you’ll try to eliminate them.

Next Monday is Right to Read Day, when the ALA asks citizens to “stand up to censorship” from “organized pressure groups” that want to ban books. And let’s be clear: The vast majority of the attacks on books have come from the political right, not from the left.

But if my fellow liberals don’t stand up for freedom — for everyone — we won’t have a leg to stand on as conservatives try to tear it down. When we adopt the tools of the censor, everybody loses.