No Love For The Haters: Illinois Bans Book Bans (But Not Really)

Across the nation, bigoted politicians (of the Republican variety, almost exclusively) are trying to punish and silence content and expression they don’t like.

It’s not like it’s even a close question about who’s doing this and why. A slew of bills targeting drag shows and LGBTQ+ writing have been tossed into legislatures all over the nation. Some of those have become law. Most of those that have become law have been challenged in court — challenges often followed swiftly by injunctions prohibiting their enforcement.

But that hasn’t stopped a very motivated, very ignorant subset of politicians from continuing to push laws that threaten civil liberties. And — win or lose — it hasn’t stopped a very determined, extremely minute subset of individuals from trying to make the United States a worse place to live for anyone who isn’t straight and white.

The Washington Post has published a series of articles on book bans and book challenges based on public records it has obtained. What politicians love to portray as a groundswell movement representing a majority of the nation are actually just the psychotic actions of extremely shitty people with far too much time on their hands.

According to an analysis by the Post, 60% of book challenges made in the 2021-2022 school year came from the same 11 adults. […] The majority of objections were on books authored by or about LGBTQ+ people or people of color. 

None of these people are worried whether or not children might have access to books like, say, Mein Kampf or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or even the super-sexed up compositions of a dozens of romance novelists. Nope, the publications these 11 people (and the politicians who cater to them) are concerned with deal with certain topics these people would rather children had no knowledge of.

Nearly half of the challenges in The Post’s database, 43 percent, targeted titles with LGBTQ characters or themes.

[…]

Thirty-six percent of targeted books featured characters of color or dealt with issues of race and racism. Of the top 10 most challenged books in The Post’s database, five fell into this category: George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Jonathan Evison’s “Lawn Boy,” Ashley Hope Pérez’s “Out of Darkness” and Angie Thomas’s “The Hate U Give.”

The good news is that none of this shit is going to fly in Illinois. A bill [PDF] signed by Governor JB Pritzer last year took effect January 1st. It’s a ban on book bans, and it means the tactics deployed by the 11 people noted above (along with groups like Moms for Liberty) won’t be nearly as effective in Illinois as they have been elsewhere.

The new law contains a statement of intent from state legislators:

It is further declared to be the policy of the State to encourage and protect the freedom of libraries and library systems to acquire materials without external limitation and to be protected against attempts to ban, remove, or otherwise restrict access to books or other materials.

It sounds pretty good until you look at the text of the law, which leaves it up to publicly-funded libraries to fight back against censorship with no guarantee the state of Illinois will always have its back. The law ties state funding to ban resistance at the library level — something that can easily be overridden by future laws that might, say, tie funding to complying with state or local-level book bans.

In order to be eligible for State grants, a library or library system shall adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights that indicates materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval or, in the alternative, develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials within the library or library system.

Cool, I guess. If the legislative intent is just “Hey, don’t ban books or we’ll take your money,” mission accomplished. Sure, this might make it easier for libraries to reject book challenges by pointing challengers to the law that ties funding to open access to content. On the other hand, adopting a private party’s “bill of rights” isn’t going to protect the state’s libraries from being forced to cooperate with book bans handed down by state or local politicians.

To actually protect libraries against current and future enemies, the state needs to codify this prohibition of book bans at the state level. And it should do this. There’s no reason it shouldn’t. Protecting libraries from future book bans isn’t going to turn libraries into vast repositories of pornography. All it’s going to do is protect libraries (and their users) from content bans the next time the prevailing political winds shift.

Sure, this makes it slightly more difficult for state pols to enact book bans that target public libraries by tying their funding to these stipulations. But those most likely to push statewide book bans don’t really care whether or not people have free access to published works. All that matters to them is that certain works dealing with certain subject matter written by certain people won’t be available to anyone who doesn’t have cash on hand to purchase these works.

Nice try, Illinois. But try harder. This is barely better than nothing at all.