This isn't Florida specific but is definitely worth a read:
... probably most importantly, why do you think that banning and burning books makes you the good guys somehow? Looking back at history, people who burned books are pretty much always viewed through a negative lens as far as I can remember. I have friends who are still salty about the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria if that gives you any hints.
People Who Ban Books are Never Right
At no point in history have those who seek to restrict knowledge and progress been the “good guys.”
Matthew Maniaci
I can’t believe that I have to say this at all, but banning and burning books is, broadly and generally speaking, a bad thing. As in it is never acceptable, like, ever. Why are we even having this discussion?
First off, it’s incredibly ineffectual in the modern age. We have things like Amazon, where we can download a truly incredible number of e-books on a variety of topics, including an absolutely jaw-dropping amount of smut. Do you really think that banning a handful of books about being queer is going to stop kids from getting their grubby little hands on them?
I know parents whose kids can manage to get through whatever parental controls they have established to buy loads of stuff on their parents’ credit cards. Failing that, many teenagers will simply buy things they want with allowance money and hide them from their parents, assuming their parents aren’t supportive and wouldn’t just buy that thing for them anyway.
Barring that, there’s always petty crime, a favorite of teenagers everywhere. An author I follow heard from a librarian that the most stolen books are the ones that kids need to read at that point in their lives. Do you really think that kids who want to find out what is happening with them won’t just steal those books from a bookstore if it came down to it? I’m not a big fan of crime in general, but I am also willing to bet that a bunch of queer authors would rather lose a sale to theft if it means a kid survives high school.
Second, the books that the current crop of banners and burners are targeting are generally focused on queerness and BIPOC rights. Why, you might ask, are they targeting these books? Because, and this is the quiet part that gets said out loud a lot, they view these populations as not equal to white people.
Queerness is sinful according to them, and being BIPOC is to be inherently inferior. The notion that these people can write articulate books that tell the stories of their lives and histories is dangerous to them because their lives and histories have been damaged by white people. They view the knowledge that white people just might have perpetrated crimes against nonwhite, non-straight folks as dangerous.
This is why their poor children must be protected from being traumatized by that knowledge. How dare you let little Keighleigh and little Brantley learn something that might make them feel bad about themselves? It’s almost as though history is full of horrors perpetrated by those in power! You know, things that those people don’t want everyone to find out about!
If you are learning about history and it doesn’t make you feel at least a little bit uncomfortable, you are not learning history, you are reading a sanitized retelling through the lens of the author. Young kids may not be ready for the graphic details of the Holocaust, but they need to learn at least a bit about them so that we do not repeat those mistakes.
And, if you try to pull out a “think of the children” argument, I’d like to point out that ...
At no point in history have those who seek to restrict knowledge and progress been the “good guys.”
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