Book Bans Don’t Scare Me

Hear me out.

This is not meant to minimize the colossal impact that book bans have on people. Authors see months, maybe years of work get flushed down the toilet, young people lose access to resources that might help them through a struggle, educators lose access to tools that might further their endeavors, and that’s just off the top of my head.

But book bans don’t scare me, not even as an author. They shouldn’t scare you either.

When politicians choose to ban a book, it’s usually because they don’t want that material accessible to the general public. This can be for a myriad of reasons, most of them nefarious, but at the heart of the ban is control. In this case, the weak-minded powers that be do not want a populace that contains even the smallest percentage of people they deem ‘unacceptable’. They don’t want the LGBTQIA+ in their communities. Their cities. Their country. So the first thing they do is attempt to quash all access to things that they believe would encourage the ‘idea’. The low thinking is that if the resources aren’t available, fewer people will end up ‘undesirable’.

Bad news though: it doesn’t work that way. People are who they are.

Book bans don’t scare me because one of the core tenets of the human condition is defiance. Tell someone they can’t do something and they’ll rush headlong into it just to prove a point. Tell a teenager they can’t do something. See how that works out.

There’s also this little thing called the internet. Long gone are the days of having to travel miles to find some obscure text. Now, like it or not, people make their living making ‘forbidden’ texts available…in any number of ways. People who grew up using the internet are not going to have a hard time finding e-copies of whatever material isn’t readily available to them. How it affects them is irrelevant. They’ll read this stuff because they’ve been told not to.

Finally, book bans don’t scare me because the entire point of the ban is fear. Material within banned materials absolutely horrifies the people who are doing the banning. There is no threat here; they simply cannot stomach anything that is different from their ‘normal’ ideal. I’m not afraid of what’s different. I’m not afraid to share a bathroom with someone who isn’t my gender. I don’t worry about some book turning my kid gay. I know that people are born how they are born, and nothing changes that.

So no, book bans don’t scare me, and they shouldn’t scare you, either. There are too many workarounds to the system for this stuff not to find its way into the right hands. So I’m going to keep writing my stories, speaking my truth, and advocating for those who need a voice. I encourage you to do the same.

Thanks for reading.