Absolutely. Why is everyone responding to this thread going right to Mein Kampf? It was very easy for me to access that book.

> It's not really a "banned book week" unless you're pissing everybody off.

They did. Oh, they did. Lots of parents got pissed every year. Censors will censor.

The point they’re trying to make is the librarian is already the censor by the fact that they decide what books to buy.

The librarian gets pissed if someone attempts to “do their job” or override them, either by banning a book they want or forcing them to carry a book they do not want.

I find it hard to believe that someone doesn’t have some books they think the library shouldn’t carry, even if it’s just The Art of the Deal.

This was simply not the case at my middle school, and since my aunt was the librarian, I had a lot of insight into the administrative war going on behind the scenes. She was constantly being denied books that she wanted to introduce into our library.

The tone was set by the parents and administration, which comes from a heavy Christian brand of authoritarianism which has had the Deep South in a vice grip since the beginning.

The librarians did the best they could under the circumstances, and the only way we can consider them censors is if we overgeneralize and oversimplify the situation to the point where words start to lose their semantic value and anything can be anything else if you squint hard enough.

Providing a wide range of books based on pedagogical goals and training in library sciences or education is quite a bit different than showing up at a school board meeting to get a book removed because you read a one page excerpt that involved something in the valence of sex.

And it's a bullshit argument meant to invalidate people working against authoritarian measures. If everything (even selecting/recommending books for others to read is censorship than the term becomes meaningless, which I guess is the intent of the argument).

> Why is everyone responding to this thread going right to Mein Kampf?

Because they're riding a political hobby horse, insisting that the only valid defense of 1A (free speech) is to demand a figurative repeal of 3A. i.e. to require librarians to quarter the enemy's troops in their house. Because apparently the only valid measure of how free your speech is, is how much you tolerate some of the most censorious regimes in history.

Enemy troops?

Tolerance of censorship?