> I found myself confronting the rise of bans on books that discuss gender identity and sexuality. Today, sexual education in public schools grows increasingly under threat in places like Florida
Please. There are no bans on books discussing such matters. You can purchase them from Amazon and other booksellers, while in 19th century England there were civil and criminal penalties for book publishers for the mere act of publishing. That's quite different. Public schools may ban books only for their own institutions, never for the general public. Any "school ban" does not prevent any parent righteously concerned with censorship to provide their child a copy of such banned book.
I don't follow your objection. Banning books on sexuality from public schools threatens sexual education in those same schools. That is true even if individual parents can purchase such books for their children on the open market.
The point of universal education is to provide for all students, _especially_ those whose parents are unwilling or unable to provide a quality education independently.
The point is that decisions made by schools about which books they use or not are not equal to legally enforceable book bans for the general public. The article commingles these two ideas. That is the objection.
The snippet you quoted does not support that objection, though. It is clear from context that the "book bans" referred to are in the realm of public education.
There are large groups of Americans who believe The Handmaidens Tale is a real potential future. The lack of perspective and melodramatic discord in political theater is exhausting.
Not the same. Public schools (and private schools, and any library) choose which books are on their library shelves. They have no control over what is published elsewhere.
> I found myself confronting the rise of bans on books that discuss gender identity and sexuality. Today, sexual education in public schools grows increasingly under threat in places like Florida
Please. There are no bans on books discussing such matters. You can purchase them from Amazon and other booksellers, while in 19th century England there were civil and criminal penalties for book publishers for the mere act of publishing. That's quite different. Public schools may ban books only for their own institutions, never for the general public. Any "school ban" does not prevent any parent righteously concerned with censorship to provide their child a copy of such banned book.