Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.) started Thursday’s House Education subcommittee hearing on book bans with a warning.
“Before getting started, I would like to make a disclaimer that we are going to be handling some very sensitive, mature issues today. We will be discussing wildly inappropriate books that are accessible in school libraries,” he said.
The hearing of the subcommittee on elementary and secondary education, chaired by Bean, reflected similar debates playing out in school board hearings across the country, where proponents of book bans often point to sexual content to make their point.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), the committee’s ranking member, reminded the witnesses, all but one whom supported book bans, of the setting for Thursday’s discussion.
“I’ll note that this is the U.S. Congress and not a school board meeting,” she said.
She said censorship laws are “being enacted by extreme MAGA politicians under the pretext of parental rights.”
Lindsey Smith, a chapter chair for the Moms for Liberty organization, took issue with the idea that she was endorsing “book banning.”
“I would like to address the lie that parental groups and Moms for Liberty are ‘book banning,’” Smith said. “If removing a sexual explicit book from school libraries is what you see as book banning, then you need to reevaluate your language.”
She went on to reference graphic parts of books such as “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe, asking Congress if this is the content they want American children reading while at school.
She asked committee members to envision students reading an illustrated scene in which “a strapped-on penis is visible on the partner with oral sex being performed graphically.”
Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed with Smith’s stance and questioned why there was so much pushback against library censorship.
“Why is it, exactly, that leftwing nonprofits, the media, and the Biden administration are so keen to enforce stocking school libraries with pornographic material,” he asked.
He went on to list the top 10 most-removed books from libraries, describing material such as “a how to guide to meeting strangers on sex apps,” “underage incest,” “10-year-olds performing sodomy on each other,” “disposing of a condom soiled from anal sex” and “a meth-fueled rape.”
“It’s perfectly natural, normal, and responsible for parents to prefer that school districts not stock their libraries with pornographic material,” he said. “And it’s good for school board members to meet the moral preferences of parents.”
However, Democrats on the committee were unmoved. Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said “the erosion of [the] public institution” is happening in part because of those “trying to control what people read and don’t read” and called book banning “a huge threat to public education.”
The lone witness opposed to book bans at libraries was Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education programs for PEN America, a nonprofit organization that focuses on free speech issues as they relate to literature.
“We can — and we must — distinguish between a parent raising a particular concern to a school official, and a well-organized campaign to mobilize people to disrupt public education writ large,” Friedman said.
PEN America monitors book banning across the country, and last year the organization said it once again saw an “escalation of book bans and censorship in classrooms and school libraries across the United States,” despite the majority of parents being opposed to such decisions.
Megan Degenfelder, the superintendent of Public Instruction for Wyoming’s Department of Education, said that while she agrees that there is inappropriate content in American school libraries, she does not think it is up to the federal government to solve this issue.
“So how do we solve this issue,” Degenfelder asked of inappropriate books in schools. “It certainly should not be up to the federal government. I respect local control in government. Education is no exception, so I respect the duly elected school board authority over books and curriculum.”
Before the hearing adjourned, Bonamici urged her colleagues to refocus their attention on other pressing education issues.
“We need to continue this conversation, but we also need to get back to doing what’s best for children,” she said. “Let’s talk about the schools where they don’t even have a library.”