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You say it looks more like censorship...are you acknowledging it isn't quite censorship? I think you'll agree that libraries have the right to decide which books to put on their shelves, and which books to take from their shelves; is it necessarily wrong for them to consider outside input when making those decisions?
I think I see where you're coming from in talking about classics and currently popular books, but if you carry through that line of thought you'll arrive at a double standard. Let's say two books get removed from the shelves, one popular and one obscure. I don't want to say only the popular book has been censored.
I'll certainly agree with you that school boards and other governing bodies that control libraries have made all sorts of bad decisions. Some of those decisions amply deserve a public campaign against them. But not every bad decision counts as banning or censorship.
Obviously, a public library can't carry every book that has ever been published, and most often the absence of a book from their collection will not be due to politics. And teachers (and increasingly, school boards) do get to decide what the curriculum will be in their district. I think most people aren't going to assign Ulysses to a bunch of grade schoolers. And there are plenty of reasons to discuss whether even high schoolers will benefit from reading this particular classic as opposed to a dozen or more others.
I don't think anyone is calling this censorship.
But there's a big difference between saying, "Kids this age would probably appreciate or learn more from a different classic from that period and culture" and saying "don't you dare teach it because it's obscene." It's a ban, imo, when the exclusion is politically motivated rather than pedagogically or economically motivated.
When a group says that a book should not be read or made available to other people because said book offends the group's sensibilities, that's challenging. When their challenge is heeded, that's banning.
In the US, bans tend to be local or restricted to age-specific contexts (like schools). Whether or not this is a concern depends, I suppose, on whether or not you want to read that book and you can't afford to buy it online, and whether or not there's an underlying principle you find offensive (when a particular group gets to decide what's offensive or age-appropriate for everyone else in their community).
I guess I don't understand what this argument is about. Are people saying National Banned Books Week is a hoax because no books are ever banned in the US anymore? Or are they saying it's actually very rare for books to be truly banned (as opposed to unavailable for some other reason), so it's not really something to worry about?
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