Across the country, school boards are implementing bans on books they deem "inappropriate." Ahead of next week's midterm elections, the ACLU has penned a letter to Michigan school districts urging them to restore access to restricted materials.
According to the letter, complaints from parents have swayed several Michigan schools to remove "highly acclaimed" books from school libraries and classrooms, an effort the ACLU calls "harmful and misguided."
Alongside restrictions on discussion of sexuality in classrooms, the wave of book bans largely targets information surrounding LGBTQ+ identities. In fact, voters in Jamestown Township, located near Grand Rapids, recently decided to defund their public library because of their queer materials.
Jay Kaplan, attorney at the ACLU of Michigan's LGBTQ+ Rights Project, said in a statement via the Detroit Free Press that book bans are an attack on First Amendment rights, especially in schools.
"In addition to threatening the First Amendment rights of all students, this wave of book-banning is an attack on LGTBQ+ children and their families, and it must be stopped," Kaplan elaborated. "For countless youth who face bullying, isolation, and depression, access to LGBTQ+ representation or information in books and literature can be a refuge — and in some cases lifesaving. School libraries are places where young people should be able to learn about themselves and people who are different from themselves, not denied access to the diverse perspectives that books and literature offer us all.”
Jonathan Friedman of Pen America previously toldThe Advocate Channel that a common strategy among conservatives is to send groups of parents to school board meetings to pressure officials into banning books. In some cases, they use intimidation.
The ACLU's letter to hundreds of Michigan school leaders explains: "And when books can be removed based on parents’ complaints about the author’s message or point of view, it paves the way for an unending series of attempts by one group or another to cleanse a school of reading material based on what a vocal faction finds objectionable. In the end, schools become another arena for political warfare, rather than a space of learning for our youth. Neither students nor their communities are well- served by this practice."
The letter urged school boards to "resist any attempts to remove books from your school libraries" and "restore students’ access to all censored materials as soon as possible." To not do so, the ACLU says, would be an implicit threat to Democracy.
"In debating whether to allow students to check out a controversial book from the school library, it is easy to lose sight of the overarching function of our schools: to train young people to think for themselves," it reads. "When school officials attempt to create a 'sanitized' learning space by eliminating controversial texts from school libraries, they undermine this critical function of public education."
