Allow children to experience and read about different lives, different ways and different worlds, allow children to ask questions. They are more intelligent than you think. Allow people to think for themselves. If you want a creative, entrepreneurial, dynamic, pluralistic, knowledge based society don’t ban books. If you want a society that is kinder and tolerant and diverse and is sensitive to its weakest members then don’t ban books.
Be inclusive, respect differences, don't ban these books:
The thing is words have power and if you start pulling books from library shelves and banning books, you then feel it’s ok to impose your own ideas on others by regulating and policing “acceptable ideology”, then you move on to excluding and marginalising people with ideas and behavior you don’t like - telling people unless you conform to majority norms then you are nothing - until finally you end up normalizing the persecution and brutality of minorities, and you end up with an intolerant, static, authoritarian society.
By all means disagree and bring your children up the way you want, but please don't ban books for other more tolerant, less judgmental people and think you are protecting them in any way.
Fascism doesn’t announce itself with the bang of jackboots on the streets outside, it starts with a whimper from those who should know better, who acquiesce in demonizing a minority and perform such a seemingly petty act as pulling a few books from a library shelf.
But it’s not petty to ban books and pulp them.
It’s an attack on knowledge. It’s an act of bigotry and it’s wrong.
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