More Fun with Fallacies: No, it’s not “pornography;” yes, it is a ban; and don’t even get me started on “rating systems.”
by Gayle Martin
This past Wednesday, Free to Read Rochester gave away books to new teachers in our district so that they could build starter classroom libraries. I had a blast. The new teachers were surprised when they learned elementary teachers could take up to 50 books and middle school and high school teachers could take up to 20 books (we had over 1,000 to give away!). F2R2 received many heart-felt “thank yous,” and I even got a hug. And I got to pretend I owned a little indy bookshop (my dream) for a while. A great time was had by all.
After the event, there were various posts on Facebook about it. One of the posts mentioned that some of our current Board of Education candidates “would like what’s happening in Florida and Texas…to happen here.” And, oh boy. You should have seen the goal posts moving!
So, let me slip into my rhetorical analysis teacher mode again.
“Moving the goalposts” is an informal logical fallacy in which when an argument is rebutted, the arguer ignores the evidence in the rebuttal and instead changes the argument in a “well, yeah, but what about this idea, then?” way. Then the arguer demands that the opponent rebut that as if it was always the main argument, and so on and so on. The would-be book banners around the country and in our district have constantly been moving the goal posts in the debate about books in schools as their challenges have been called out as hyper-politicized, unconstitutional, and undemocratic.
Let’s look at the rhetorical shifting in our district.
Goal Post One and Two (occurring, ironically, together): “It’s pornography!” and also “It’s not a ban!”
Way back in February when the would-be banners first spoke about the books at a school board meeting, their “argument” was that the books in question were “pornographic” and, therefore, should be removed. Some even said the person “responsible” for them being in the library should be fired. When the would-be banners saw on social media that I and another Free to Read member were asking for donations of the challenged books to distribute to teachers who may want them for their classroom libraries, we were called “disgusting” and some suggested we should be arrested for “distributing pornography to minors.”
But individuals don’t get to decide for themselves what is “pornographic” or “obscene” for everyone else in the community. Because we have the First Amendment. Yes, the courts have ruled that “obscenity” is not protected speech under the First Amendment, but they have also struggled over the years to legally define exactly what “obscenity” is. The current standard, established in 1973, is known as “The Miller Test.” In Miller v. California, the Supreme Court outlined three criteria a text had to meet to be considered legally obscene. To paraphrase the criteria:
The overall purpose of the text “taken as a whole” is to sexually arouse.
Most people, “applying contemporary community standards,” would find the text “patently offensive.”
The text lacks any “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”
To be clear, in order for a text to be considered obscene, and, therefore not protected by the First Amendment, the entire text has to meet all three criteria. There is no legal world in which one passage of a book or one frame from a graphic novel taken out of context can be banned because a few people find the passage or frame “patently offensive.”
But, of course, the would-be book banners insist that they are not trying to ban books, anyway. This claim was made at the same February Board of Education meeting at which they called the books obscene and said that students shouldn’t have access to them at school. Apparently the would-be book banners took offense at being called book banners, which one would think would cause them to engage in self-reflection about why that may be. But, nope. Instead, they engaged in some interesting doublethink, arguing that what they were asking for wasn’t a “ban” because kids could still get the books at bookstores or at the public library.
That is all poppycock. What they were (and are) asking for is literally the definition of a ban: “Book banning, a form of censorship, occurs when private individuals, government officials, or organizations remove books from libraries, school reading lists, or bookstore shelves because they object to their content, ideas, or themes.” And, when it happens in a public school, it is illegal.
In Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (1982), the Supreme Court ruled that schools could not remove books from school library shelves “simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.” What prompted the Pico case is also relevant to what is currently happening in Rochester and around the country. Some Island Trees board of education members went to a political event at which they received a list of books a speaker at the event found objectionable for various reasons. When the BoE members came back to their district, they checked to see if the school libraries had any of the books on the list, and then pulled any books from the list that they found. Part of the reason, in other words, that the Supreme Court found the removal of the books unconstitutional is because the books were removed for political reasons, not pedagogical reasons.
Goal Post Three: “It’s too ‘sexually explicit’ for minors!”
After all the hullabaloo at the BoE meetings, however, when the books were officially challenged, none were challenged for being “pornographic” or “obscene.” They were challenged for being too “sexually explicit” and inappropriate for high school students. Determining whether or not a text is “sexually explicit,” much less too sexually explicit for a group of mostly minors, is a much murkier call than whether or not a text meets the criteria of the Miller Test. The goal post had been moved.
The problem is that “sexually explicit” can have many interpretations. What one person finds “sexually explicit,” another person may not. Moreover, students aged 14-18 obviously have widely different levels of maturity, interests, reading abilities, etc.
Media Specialists and teachers know this, and they know it better than other adults who do not work with a large population of teenagers. ELA teachers and certainly Media Specialists are trained in how to choose books at both appropriate reading levels and appropriate age/grade levels. They look for literature with not just interesting plots but also with rich characterization and themes. They might not know every student personally, and they certainly don’t know the beliefs of every parent. But they know their students in general. They see what books their students bring from home, they know what books their students talk about and ask for, they are familiar with their students’ races, ethnicities, religions, and diverse families and personal experiences. Most importantly, teachers and media specialists know that there is a big difference between teaching a book to all students in a class and simply having a book available for a student who may want–or need–it.
Some books that the RCS would-be banners labeled as too “sexually explicit” for high school students have content similar to what you might overhear walking down a high school hallway, or they were labeled “sexually explicit” only because there is a LGBTQ+ character or relationship in them or a character is struggling with gender identity. But some of the books challenged in RCS certainly have passages that are “sexually explicit” and difficult to read. These passages mostly involve sexual assaults. As a teacher, I would never have assigned such a passage for all my students to read. I never would have read them aloud to any group of people, students or otherwise, as many of the would-be banners have done at school board meetings–in front of children, sometimes much younger than the high school students who had access to the books. These passages are written precisely to show the trauma of sexual assault or abuse. They are especially difficult when they are taken out of context, as they are when they are read aloud at board meetings, and all the listener hears is the trauma and not how the characters eventually confronted and overcame the trauma.
But here’s the thing: with the exception of The Handmaid’s Tale, all of the books are about teenagers. Two of the books–All Boys Aren’t Blue and Fun Home–are memoirs about the real experiences of the authors when they were children and teenagers. One book–Flamer–is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel based on the author’s experiences during middle school. Four of the six books–All Boys Aren’t Blue, Flamer, Check Please!, and The Haters–were specifically written for a Young Adult audience. So while the books may not be appropriate for some high school students, it is impossible to argue they are not appropriate for any high school students.
Goal Post 4: “We don’t want any books removed! We just want them rated!”
The new goal post that I saw for the first time in the comments on the Build a Starter Library Facebook post is that no one wants any books removed from libraries. They only want them rated. After saying that it “isn’t exactly a fair assessment of what some at RCS are asking for,” one commenter said, “It has been suggested to resolve this issue that a rating type system be put in place similar to movie and TV ratings” and again that “[n]o one is looking to ‘ban’ books, just a way to understand what is available to their children and a common sense way to opt their children out if they choose.”
There are so many issues with this, I will enumerate them:
It was a fair assessment, and, yes, people were asking to ban books (as noted above). I was at the board meetings and have been paying pretty close attention to this, and I never heard anyone suggest a rating system.
There was no “issue” to “resolve” until the would-be banners made an issue.
Any idea why books don’t already have a “rating type system…similar to movie and TV ratings”? Volume. Four hundred three movies were released in the U.S. and Canada in 2021. On the other hand, it is estimated that 500,000 to 1 million books are published annually. If you take into account self-publishing, that number is estimated to be closer to 4 million. Similarly, there have to be hundreds of thousands of books in Rochester School’s building libraries. Assuming there was some easy, fair rating system, exactly who is going to read and rate all of those books? The logistics alone are impossible.
And it would be redundant. The books are already chosen and leveled by trained, professional media specialists. If parents don’t trust those media specialists and want to find out more about a book, there are numerous easy ways to do so. Read a review of the book. If you want a more detailed account of content parents may find objectionable, Common Sense Media does a thorough analysis, and you can even sign up for parent emails. Or, you know. Read the book yourself or with your child.
More importantly, exactly what rating system would be used and for what purpose? Do the would-be banners want to impose some ultra-conservative rating system, like Moms for Liberty’s own Book Looks, which is currently being adopted in some schools nationally? Once all the thousands and thousands of books in our libraries were rated (would they not be available until they are rated?), how would the rating system be used? It seems the only way such a system would make some parents feel comfortable is if books with certain ratings would then be restricted for all students or even removed from libraries (which sounds a lot like a BAN). Let’s take the Book Looks rating system. They rate books from 0 (“For Everyone”) to 5 (“Aberrant Content”). Right in the middle is a 3 (“Minor Restricted - Under 18 requires guidance of parent or guardian”). So, does that mean that if a book is rated a 3 it can be in a school library but must be kept on a restricted shelf and a child can only access it with written permission from a parent? And if a book is rated a 4 (“No Minors”) or a 5, does that mean a book must be removed entirely from the school library? This would seem to be a reasonable assumption of how such a system would be used to make some parents feel more comfortable.
Parents can “understand what is available” to their children by accessing the library database, and the “common sense option to opt their children out” is to contact the library and tell the media specialist that is what you want.
Goal Post 5: “Rating systems are fine because parents can ‘opt in’ to any content they want their kid to have access to.”
After some discussion on the Facebook post about problems with rating systems, another commenter posted this, “[W]ith rating systems (which has actually been proposed months ago by one of our candidates) you can opt your kids IN for everything if you’d like. So why should a rating system be a problem for anyone? Unless it’s because you’d like to dictate what content other kids see?” Ladies and gentlemen, the goal posts have left the stadium.
*Sigh*
Another enumeration is necessary:
“Our candidates”? I thought school board candidates were supposed to be non-partisan. Shouldn’t it be “the candidates”?
Sure, fine. One of the candidates suggested a rating system several months ago. I missed it, though, and a rating system certainly wasn’t a suggestion for the six challenged books. Plus, it’s still a terrible idea.
So. Parents can “opt in” to any content they want, huh? Except that is not the way public schools work! There is no such thing as “opting in” to curricula, policies and procedures. Enrolling in the school district is a default “opt in” to all of these. It’s not as if parents have an ala carte menu they choose from each year for what they want and what they don’t: “Yes, this year we’ll have the school schedule, the discipline policy, and the grading criteria and scale, but little Johnny really doesn’t want the attendance policy or the hall pass policy.” The current policy in RCS is that the trained, professional media specialist curates the titles in the school library and all students in the school have access to all materials. If a parent doesn’t like this policy, the parent can opt their child out of it. If some unknown rating system administered by some unknown person or persons were imposed to curate and possibly restrict or eliminate some books, that would be a new library policy! And then parents who want their kids to have access to any book would have to opt out of that, not opt in to something.
If you are a would-be book banner, you might say, so what? It’s all just semantics, right? What’s the big deal about opting out or opting in? Here’s the big deal. This is how some of these book rating systems have played out in Florida, which is seeing schools implement the Moms for Liberty system:
A very small number of parents actually opt their kids out of access to material. However, because parents aren’t used to having to opt their children into access to school resources, trusting the teachers in their schools to choose books and curricular materials, the “opt in” numbers are also lower.
5. And, let’s face it. If a rating system that restricts books so that only some kids can access them is implemented, a school media specialist isn’t going to waste precious resources even buying books that might be restricted. Which means the would-be book banners get exactly what they want–a de facto ban on the material they disagree with.
I’m not sure where else the would-be book banners are going to move the goal posts to next. But I’m sure they will. And it is exhausting, all that running around in mental circles. It would be a lot easier on all of us if they would just be up front about what they’re doing and what they want. Just say it: “We want these books banned (or removed or restricted or whatever makes them feel better about themselves) because we don’t like the content in them.”
Honesty with yourself and others is always the best policy.
