Are MCS Book Bans Discriminatory?

Why the attack on mature content is a red herring.

Welcome back to the land of Special, Different, Better BANNED, Marietta. The Board of Education officially nixed the bad bad books last month, and the jury is still out on whether the minds of the vulnerable MCS young are, in fact, cleaner now. 

Fortunately for you, and unfortunately for the Board of Education, we’re not quite done reporting on this winding nausea-inducing roller coaster of a story. Today we attempt to bring the blurry line between book bans and anti-LGBT discrimination into focus. That line, dear Reader, is shorter than you might think.

The “Sexually Explicit” → Discrimination Pipeline

Trigger warning for those of us who had to study analogies for our university entrance exams, but “sexually explicit” is to “book bans” what “state’s rights” is to “The Civil War.” The difference is that history and experience have already brought that red herring of concern into focus: We know now that “state’s rights” is the secret code for protecting the right to own slaves in the late 1800s. We argue, friends, that raising parental alarm over “sexually explicit” content follows a similar process in maintaining anti-LGBT sentiments, exclusion, and pathologization. Future generations will see this clearly when 2023 is considered history, but you can join the smart kids early if you want. Here’s how:

• LGBT experience and LGBT history are in part defined by sexual interest, desire, and acts. In the same way that implementing a directive that limits access to controversial topics like slavery would disenfranchise books about the Black American experience, attacking books for some types of mature content uniquely attacks the LGBT community, its history, and its stories.

• LGBT history is happening now. Marriage equality is recent. Openly gay athletes, senators, and school teachers are recent. The AIDs epidemic isn’t that far in the past. The artists, writers, creatives, visionaries, who are documenting LGBT experiences and perspectives in their work are building what will one day be considered LGBT historical fiction, LGBT canon, the LGBT classics. Focusing book bans on the last 20 years, as our school board did, disenfranchises these important topics. Book banners may rationalize removal of recent books via their lacking “historical value,” but they are glossing over the fact that LGBT people have only been allowed to come out of the shadows within the last few decades: of course many important books have hit the shelves since the turn of the century!

• LGBT teens, like all teens, are discovering and grappling with their identities because of their sexual attraction. There is a reason why the awakening of sexual attraction is a major theme in coming-of-age stories in literature. The difference is, for LGBT teens, their feelings and development do not mirror the experiences of the majority of their peers. This adds a layer of friction and confusion their straight peers do not grapple with. Similarly, if an organization adopts a perspective that stories capturing racial conflict are divisive, that will uniquely disenfranchise important voices that feature Black and Brown experiences, development, and interests in meaningful, historically accurate ways. 

• Diluting mature themes from LGBT book offerings (for mature, High School audiences!) removes the most meaningful components of LGBT literature. Thoughtful media center specialists put these books on the shelves because they know that one cannot divorce mature experiences, mature descriptions, mature confusions, mature identity-related questions from the LGBT experience any more than one can divorce racial discrimination from the Black experience. Uncomfortable realities are spoken into life artistically via books for a reason. The highly trained curators of our libraries avoid removals because they know they dilute LGBT history and experience in the library, stripping the shelves of the very texts that are most meaningful. Just like curators would not say “only allow books featuring Black characters if they don’t grapple with their experiences of racism,” it’s discriminatory to assert that sexual experiences can be removed from LGBT books for high school students but continue to meaningfully explore LGBT life, culture, and history. 

What MCS book banners are saying to their LGBT students and families is: 

We are comfortable with your existence, with your development, with your stories, with your history, so long as it mirrors straight existence, straight development, straight stories, and straight history. You cannot have your own stories that meaningfully explore your unique and valuable adolescent and adult development. Your coming-of-age stories are acceptable if they feel “straight” enough that the community doesn’t fear them.

The Unfortunate Discriminatory Outcomes

As part of the 23 appeals for reinstatement – including 500 pages – submitted by 11 Marietta City Schools parents last month, the topic of discriminatory decision making toward LGBT content was immediately identified. Fact-based claims have already been clearly documented in parents’ public comments and several stories covered by the regional media.

Somewhere between 40-50% of the books banned feature prominent LGBT characters and themes, depending on whether you believe Superintendent Grant Rivera or the adults who actually read the books. Given that there are 100 out of 20,000 books in the LGBT section of the MCS Media Center (<1%), even one LGBT book being removed out of 23 would be a disproportionately high amount. If we generously adopt Dr. Rivera’s conservative guess of 40%, LGBT books were massively over-represented in the MCS book ban. 

Administrators and Board Members can whisper, sing, or scream out loud that they “did not intend to single out LGBT content,” but that does not negate the fact that they unequivocally did, unintentionally or not.  Open records requests show that MCS employees, parents, and stakeholders cautioned the administration about the consequences of these choices, but they were not listened to.  The use of book banning lists compiled by the internet, especially those informed by Moms for Liberty, uniquely singled out LGBT content. If the hope of MCS admins was to cut down their review time and save money, the outcome yielded a list of 23 nonsensical books that (a) are tamer than hundreds left on the shelves and (b) overrepresent sexual minority perspectives by extreme margins.

Many of our admins hold masters degrees, PhDs, and EdSs which implies that they have taken a research methods course at some point in their path to leadership. If they had truly wanted to undertake an expedited review process without singling out LGBT books, they could have applied the gold standard random sampling method (see below) which would have included randomly selecting texts out of the 1,100 or so titles with mature themes their initial database search yielded and reviewed those. Instead, they used a convenience sampling method, which emblazoned the process with homophobia from the start.

This, dear Reader, is how complacency can undermine even the best of intentions. 

MCS School Board Chair Jeff DeJarnett told the MDJ:

I think any list that was out there, regardless of where the list came from, provided for Marietta … at least a list to start from. There were books on that list that are still in our library, a lot of them. But there’s books on that list that we then took in and had people decide, is this what we feel like needs to be here or doesn’t need to be here. So it was better than starting from scratch and going, OK, where do we start? The fact that there were multiple lists out there that had, in a sense already been vetted, regardless of whose name was attached to the list. It was a starting point that would at least give us a little head start to say, OK, well, here’s at least some books we can begin with.

Thank you, BOE Chair, for making our point for us. The banned book lists you mention had already been vetted by an avowed anti-LGBT organization and contained an over-representation of LGBT books. This is precisely why implementation of the book ban directive was a discriminatory process – you started with homophobic book lists. If you aren’t willing to do the work to complete a fair book review process, that’s fine, but don’t get mad when the community points out the obvious. 

We’ve always been a fan of appetizers, so here’s a little taste of what’s to come: Convenience, it seems, is the operating factor driving our book bans in Marietta City Schools, in more ways than one. Not only did the administration rely on homophobic cheat sheets to do their 20,000+ title book review, but there were more than a few books on their banned list they didn’t even bother to read or vet. We’re busy collecting winter coats for our schools’ closets and organizing the ignored parents of our community for a bit, but we’re excited to bring the story of our infamous book banning charade full circle very soon. 

Let us know which banned book you’re reading this month in the comments.