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John Oliver defended public libraries on Sunday last week tonight as local institutions “became another front in the ongoing culture war” with attacks on their funding, staff and collections.
The American Library Association documented efforts to censor over 4,240 unique book titles in schools and libraries in 2023, the highest level they’ve ever recorded, up 92% from the previous year. Library staff have also experienced a huge rise in harassment, with some being falsely accused of pedophilia for allowing certain books to be checked out.
The Supreme Court has recognized that speech cannot be suppressed solely to protect children from ideas about images that the legislature deems inappropriate for them, although there is an exception for “obscenity,” defined for minors as material that appeal to “beneficial interests”, is “offensive to prevailing standards” or “lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value”.
Still, some have tried to apply that standard “incredibly broadly,” Oliver said. A city council in Huntington Beach, California, for example, ordered all books with “sexual content” to be moved to the adult section, including children’s books featuring puberty and the title Everybody Poops.
“Increasingly, the list of books challenged in libraries can be suspiciously similar,” Oliver explained. “And that’s because the challenges often come from highly organized groups, often conservative and extremely religious, who compile and share lists of books to oppose.”
Prior to 2021, most challenges sought to remove or restrict a single book at a time. But now 93% of them try to censor multiple titles, and over half target 100 or more titles at once.
“You get the sense that the people who want to censor these books can’t have a real idea of what’s inside them, or, in fact, if they’re in the libraries at all, they’re protesting at all,” Oliver said, citing a case in Idaho where activists requested that over 400 books be removed from the library even though they were no longer there. “As far as protests go, this is about as significant as marching to the Hollywood sign to demand that Frankie Munitz return his Oscar for ‘Schindler’s List,'” he joked. “He’s not there, he wasn’t in it, and the very fact that you’re protesting it tells me you’re probably not familiar with the material.”
Numerous complaints note that parents haven’t even read the books or are quoting them out of context. Idaho library activists also demanded that the library evaluate books by “God’s standards, not the world’s standards.”
“You know Lord – the freak known for building a bare garden that he could look at all day,” quipped Oliver. “The man who ordered the building of a boat of animals and who sat back and watched as his own son was nailed. Oh sorry, am I misunderstanding the Bible by taking things out of context? Excuse me, I haven’t read it.”
Oliver reviewed the most challenging book of the last three years: Gender Queer, a young adult graphic novel about the struggles of gender identity that its own author said should be accessible to young adults, but not to children. “Some books aren’t suitable for five-year-olds, but they might be if you’re 16, because they’re two very different phases of life that we don’t treat in the same way,” Oliver said. “That’s why a 16-year-old driving a car is perfectly legal and a five-year-old driving a car is news.”
“Yet for some, keeping books like Gender Queer out of the children’s section — where it isn’t, again — is still not enough,” he continued. Some parents argued that if it’s on the library shelf, kids will find it, but as one exasperated Louisiana librarian said, “if your kid’s only in the library or alone, they probably have a phone. In that case, my library is the least of your problems.
“Exactly. That whole debate basically ends the second you remember the existence of the internet,” Oliver added. “If your child has a phone, they already have access to the most sexualized images imaginable.”
Surveying the landscape of library challenges, Oliver concluded, “Protecting libraries is a battle, but it’s also winnable. It just means standing up to all these stupid attacks when they happen, and they happen often.” and Arkansas and Oklahoma have already passed laws that allow librarians to be prosecuted for distributing “obscene” content.
“This is all crazy,” Oliver said. “And that speaks to the need for libraries to be vigorously defended.” And I know it’s no shock that an episode of this show would advocate for supporting your local libraries. It is largely implicit in our entire mood.
“But depending on where you live, you might have to pay attention if people start showing up at your local library board meeting and reading catchy passages of books for young adults,” he continued. “While it’s understandable that parents want to have a say in what their children can check out from the library, it’s not their right to have a say in what can be checked out at all.”
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