The First Amendment specifically speaks about government not limiting free expression. An indeed, school boards are a branch of the government, not a private organization. Their actions may be seen as a real infraction on the First Amendment.
If the state doesn't limit freedom of expression by choosing what material to teach in schools (which it does) then it doesn't limit it by choosing what material to host in school libraries (which it does).
If you want to say removing these books from school libraries is an illegitimate constraint on freedom of expression, then so is the school curriculum. So is public education generally.
While removing a book from a school library by the school board may be a sensible act, and does not violate the letter of the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law..."), it definitely has something to do with the spirit of it, that it, the interaction of government and free speech. It's very certainly something to keep an eye on.
Book banning means banning books. It doesn't mean removing books from school libraries. That isn't what it has ever meant. Who is doing the redefining?
The people who are saying that excluding books from libraries isn't banning. It's straightforward. Discussing this reminds me of arguing with my narcissist father - he slips through conflict by redefining terms to fit his inability to take accountability and recognize that his actions have consequences.
It really is a bad look to argue like this for a group of people who are trying to accomplish a goal.
This only affects school libraries. As long as the book is available in public libraries, and is legal to sell, buy, and possess, it's not banned. It's just considered inappropriate for minors. It's more like giving a movie an R rating than like banning.
I'm aware of that. Clarifying it only doubles down on digging the argument-by-definitions hole. I'm starting to get a sense that that's the only argument here.
You can't complain about an "argument by definitions" when your entire argument rests on applying a label like "book banning" that has significant cultural weight. Book banning sounds bad, it sounds authoritarian, and that is basically your entire argument. So yes in that scenario it is pretty fatal to your argument if you are completely misapplying it to a situation that cannot actually be described as involving book banning at all (because no books have, in fact, been banned).
So what's happening here is that there is a group who is banning books and then doing language policing because it has bad optics. What everyone else is hearing is, "Conditional banning isn't banning" which isn't a coherent argument.
It's pretty clear that if the books they are banning from these places were unconditionally banned they wouldn't go to bat for them. Rather the sentiment would be "that's good actually." It doesn't take a genius to recognize that the playbook is to make incremental advances and argue over definitions in order to achieve this goal.
> "Conditional banning isn't banning" which isn't a coherent argument.
It absolutely is a coherent argument and you know that.
"Unconditional availability" inherently excludes "banning" and also "conditional banning" but the latter is a mere subset of "banning". Denying the distinction of the sub- and its superset is extremely intellectually dishonest when that's what the entire argument hinges on.
When I dump hundreds of tons of a book into a river a day and the government requires me to stop doing that, it's not banning the book from the people living downstreams, even despite the availability of the book being reduced for them.
