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Thanks!

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This "book banning" stuff is familiar to me from when my Dad was smeared in the NYT with it.

The charge of "book banning" is used two ways by the "social justice" pilgrims. Against my Dad it was used to slander, to propagandize, to associate someone whose duty it was to decide which books are used in a curriculum, and available in school libraries with the Nazis of WWII. Because the Nazis burned books. The Nazis banned books -- books were forbidden to be owned. There are famous photos and newsreels of Nazis burning books.

Stalin also banned books and did it far more effectively -- people got killed for having certain books, not just had their books confiscated. The "social justice" pilgrims rarely mention that.

Used in this way, the "book burner" slam is just a smear -- a potent one, but still -- just a smear.

The second way the "book burning" charge is used is far more dangerous. Please take my warning on it, and stop it out.

What is that way? To force communities to fill their children's library shelves with the amoral and immoral children's book, so that the children grow up rudderless and open to all manner of immoral behavior and thus made prey to the marxists, the homosexuality lobby, the self-haters and the extreme libertarian secularists.

There are 172,000 new book titles published in the US each year. Yet which books will get the press when your town library doesn't buy them? Which ones will result in charges of "book banning"? The very ones most likely to put children at moral hazard, when the material is read by those not yet mature enough and founded enough in moral judgment to be able to read the amoral or immoral material without being harmed by it.

Take "Catcher in the Rye", for example. Unless the reader has read up to the level of Dostoevsky, or Faulkner, and has read of the long-term devastation of indulgent amoral dream-like casual sex or the amorally indulgence in similar human drives, few young intelligent teenagers will not come to consider casual sex as "that's okay too".

Catcher in the Rye is a great novel but it is both unbalanced in moral viewpoint and yet highly emotionally evocative, a very likeable and sympathetic hero, thus the novel is poison to the intelligent youngster who is not adequately established in moral bearing to be able to predict the real-life long-term consequences of what the book does not lay out.

This same is true of Nabokov's Lolita, and a good number of novels in the past fifty years.

Certainly a reader can chase after such a book on his or her own, and come to acquire a read of it, but that chase itself acts as a warning to the reader.

Yet to have such books taught to a class too young, too immature or too inexperienced in processing morally difficult literary context give the poison much more potency. It then carries the good name and moral weight of Education and becoming an adult in official community context. It makes casual sex, or whatever social vice or sloth the novel indulges, into the community standard.

Fear of being labeled a "book burner" has prevented many a responsible adult in charge of library or curriculum from enforcing reasonable community standards of morality. The results are well noted, and not good. Why are doctors pushing the HPV vaccine? Why are nearly 50% of babies born out of wedlock, why are so most families in poor districts broken?

The "rich" oppress the poor: when the responsible act not.