Oct 1, 2026, 1:56 PM@ricci
What does "banned statewide" mean here? I picked one at random and it's on a shelf in the Orem Public Library, in the heart of Utah. I'm betting others are too.
- Oct 1, 2026, 1:56 PM
Replies
- Oct 1, 2026, 1:58 PM
@ricci
Oh, you mean schools... Okay, that's very very different from "statewide" in my mind. 
Rob RicciricciOct 1, 2026, 3:26 PM@ajorg Yes, schools.
Question for you: when have the people and institutions banning books ever been the good guys?
- Oct 1, 2026, 8:27 PM
@ricci is someone saying that?
- Oct 1, 2026, 8:30 PM
@ricci my honest take on this is it's election year political theater. Banning books doesn't mean teachers in those schools were going to assign readings from them if they weren't banned, and doesn't mean kids can't go to the local library to get a copy anyway. All it means is that some voters might think that someone is protecting their kids and vote for that politician.
This isn't Fahrenheit 451, it's just politicians being politicians, and voters being voters.
- Oct 1, 2026, 8:32 PM
@ricci when have the people and institutions making inflated claims about what the bad guys are doing been the good guys?
- Rob RicciricciOct 2, 2026, 2:02 PM
@ajorg Book banning is a well-established clear line that has been proven over and over again to be part of authoritarian programs, there is not really any ambiguity here
- Oct 2, 2026, 8:24 PM
@ricci
About the book banning, probably not.About inflating from "banned from school curriculum and libraries" to "statewide" I think it's at least worth considering if paltering is a tool of "good".
It's entirely possible that both are unambiguously "bad", if there is such a thing.
- Rob RicciricciOct 2, 2026, 9:50 PM
@ajorg Sure, I can agree on that.
If you are saying that's what I did with my post, and sorry if I'm reading in something here you didn't mean, I'd like to point out that my text (which doesn't say 'banned' or 'statewide' itself) was very specifically about making it clear that the audience is an (imagined) child, which I think makes the school context quite clear. If you saying that's what the PEN America organization that I linked to is doing, the article they have is here: https://pen.org/books-banned-in-utah/ and it has 'State Board of Education' within the first few words, and the first sentence is about how the ban applies to schools. I picked the bookshop.org link from that article because it does a better job of presenting the list, which was the point of my post, which, again, was directed specifically at an imagined audience of children.
So if you are trying to make a point here, I'm not sure what it is.
- Oct 3, 2026, 3:06 PM
@ricci
The link was to bookshop.org, which had merely the provocative title Books Banned Statewide in Utah followed by a list of books. No link to better information, at least on mobile. The points I'm trying to make are that fighting something bad (book banning) with something else bad (paltering) isn't good. - Oct 3, 2026, 3:06 PM
@ricci
That's not you, that's either PEN America or bookshop.org, whoever chose to lead with something an audience might misinterpret (as I did initially) in a way that will either get them riled up with righteous indignation, or suspicious that someone is out to deceive them.A meta-point is that paltering can backfire with people who care about truth. I'm not likely to trust anything from PEN America after seeing peers get riled up by deceptive headlines.
- Rob RicciricciOct 2, 2026, 1:59 PM
@ajorg This is not something that just happened, the law was passed a few years ago (and the Utah legislature doesn't meet in the fall anyway, they meet in later winter / early spring, unless they are called into an emergency session).
The law they passed is that if three school districts ban a book, it's banned in all 41 school districts statewide. So, my kid is in a school that has banned zero books, but because districts representing 15-20% of Utah's students have banned them (and keep banning more, yes my post was inspired by several more getting added to the list this week) they've been yanked from our library too.
So, yes, this is the Utah legislature, which thinks it can co-parent with Utahns, being the Utah legislature, and handing authoritarian powers to the ~half dozen people who submit most book challenges
- Rob RicciricciOct 2, 2026, 1:50 PM
@ajorg I apologize, I thought I was getting a "it's just schools, it doesn't matter", or maybe even approval, from your response. I'm sorry for reading something there that apparently wasn't.
- Oct 2, 2026, 1:58 PM
@ricci
Thanks Rob, that's exceptionally reasonable of you. And it's a bit unreasonable of me to cut at the nuance in something as subversive as banning books rather than simply agreeing it's not good.