When the Instagram account of free-expression institution PEN America dropped successive posts last week about cat and dog related books that have recently been challenged for inappropriate content in various states and school districts, people on the platform rose up in defense of the animals, lobbing some theories into the either (cats are familiars to witches; cats are independent-minded icons known for not putting up with nonsense) but also expressed surprise that book bans are still a thing, which was exactly the point of PEN’s posts. Book bans came roaring back several years ago, when the inflection points of the COVID lockdown and the murder of George Floyd were forcing uncomfortable and messy conversations.
PEN has monitored the wheres and whys of censorship since 1922; the group defines book bans as “any action taken against a book based on its content that leads to a previously accessible book” being restricted or removed. PEN’s yearly snapshots of book-ban frequency and trends have been startlingly consistent in recent years: Between 2021 and 2023, the group’s Index of School Book Bans clocked 5,894 instances of book bans in 41 states; in the 2023–24 school year, the number was close to double that. But what do cats and dogs have to do with it?
Some of the books featured in the Instagram posts are somewhat misdirected: One look at the cover of “Bathe the Cat” reveals that the family it portrays features two dads — a common trigger for bans on books that are accused of glorifying homosexuality. Others require more digging.
“Every Dog in the Neighborhood,” for instance, is about a boy named Louis whose grandmother says he can’t adopt a dog because their neighborhood already has too many. Budding data scientist Louis decides to canvas the neighborhood to meet all the dogs and suss out exactly how many dogs constitute “too many.” Grandma, meanwhile, is hoping to transform a vacant lot into a dog park.
Between 2021 and 2023, PEN’s Index of School Book Bans clocked 5,894 instances of book bans in 41 states; in the 2023–24 school year, the number was close to double that. But what do cats and dogs have to do with it?
The ban-worthy themes here aren’t apparent: Is it the civic engagement? The grandma as custodial guardian? The interaction with neighbors in an urban setting? “The Complete Book of Cats” is even more of a head-scratcher: How much inappropriate material can “a comprehensive encyclopedia of cats and cat care” have?
Data from the American Library Association’s 2024 report, The State of America’s Libraries, gives a hint as to what’s driving up the numbers of banned and challenged books year over year. Almost 72% of challenges in 2024 came from organized groups like Moms For Liberty, and elected officials like Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, who in 2023, signed into law SF 496, a measure prohibiting books with “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” in K–12 school libraries. Book bans are currently thriving more than they have in the early 1980s, which was, coincidentally, the last time there was a political party characterized by moralizing, sex-obsessed Christofascist zealots.
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The arguments themselves haven’t changed much since 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s new administration decided that the Constitution’s separation-of-church-and-state stuff didn’t apply to its crusade against secular humanism. Book banners’ targets these days are less explicitly Bible-based, though the book remains their number-one cudgel. It’s the “humanism” part that they stand against. Their objections are not about the texts themselves; the chance that any given ban fan has read the entirety of even one of the books they’re fulminating about, much less every one they hope to ban, is as narrow as their worldview.
That hasn’t stopped them. Moms For Liberty, the Florida-based advocacy group that now boasts chapters in several cities, grew out of one of the anti-mask advocacy groups that crashed school-board meetings to shout down teachers and school administrators over vaccine requirements and mask mandates. MFL initially portrayed itself as a humble grassroots organization of patriot moms, playing down the fact that the husband of one of its founder chaired the state’s Republican party; the group has been the recipient of generous funding from the conservative Heritage Foundation and deep-pocketed Floridians like Publix supermarket heiress Julie Fancelli, who also helped fund January 6, 2021’s Stop The Steal rally.
Book banners’ targets these days are less explicitly Bible-based, though the book remains their number-one cudgel.
The scale of Moms For Liberty finally puts the lie to the idea that individual parents should be empowered to make decisions for their families; their own masks have come off to reveal a group of well-funded busybodies grasping to convince themselves that they can stop the world from leaving them behind. Like most bullies, individually, they’re pretty sad; together, their organized chaos threatens all levels of an already struggling education system.
The key to these bans is volume in both senses of the word. What media critics call “distributed amplification,” football calls “flooding the zone” and school librarians call “wasting everyone’s time” is the beginning and the end of their strategy. By protesting books in bulk and performing scandalized outrage with evocative words like “pornography” and “critical race theory,” they whip up the right amount of fear while rarely pointing to any specific content or defining their own terminology. They’re ciphers, but very loud ones. Some school districts have even begun using AI to compile their hit lists, which is going just about how you’d imagine: When “Popular Science” checked in with one Iowa school-distract superintendent, she justified AI shortcuts by saying, “Frankly, we have more important things to do than spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to protect kids from books.”
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Lone-wolf book banners also use inundation, most notably Florida man Bruce Friedman, who has bragged about challenging at least one book a day since moving from New York in 2020. (“The Daily Show”’s Michael Kosta called him “the Michael Jordan of book banning,” which is accurate only in the “f*ck them kids” sense). Florida became the nation’s undisputed leader in book banning shortly after Ron DeSantis signed a 2022 bill calling for “curriculum transparency” and allowing anyone to submit a challenge to a particular book — even if it’s at a school their children don’t go to; even if they have no children. Friedman is playing a numbers game, and if his challenges fail, he promptly files an appeal — which is functionally a ban, since challenged books are removed from school libraries pending appeal, and this guy is clogging up the system. (He told Kosta that his own son isn’t allowed in the school library because “It’s polluted.”)
The more challenges are submitted, the more likely it is for libraries to hold back potentially controversial titles. Librarians who speak out against the spuriousness of the process might themselves be removed, in order to take the heat off school districts. It’s hard not to make a less-lethal connection to the chilling effects of Roe v. Wade’s overturn, with state laws that are worded both broadly and imprecisely enough that the professionals tasked with following them aren’t safe from potential prosecution in any but the most clear-cut cases. Book banning is several orders of magnitude less urgent than sending a miscarrying patient home without care, obviously. But they occupy points on the same impossible continuum, issuing from the same source: lawmakers stripping autonomy from those whose identities, priorities and values don’t align with their own.
PEN America’s 2024 report “Banned in the USA: Narrating the crisis” notes that book bans tend to center on three categories: books that deal with sexual violence and its aftermath, books that foreground LGBTQ experience and history and books with transgender or genderless characters. But though the hits keep coming, book banners eventually get tripped up by the same problem: The people on whose behalf all this noise is ostensibly made. Parents can generally control what the precious eyes of their very young children clap onto, but once kids can do their own reading, one thing they famously don’t care for is being told what they can and can’t read by their parents or someone else’s. And anything that’s deemed subversive or dangerous automatically becomes appealing; you have to wonder: Have these folks never heard of the Tide Pod Challenge?
Book bans have turned many young people into activists: Stories of students organizing banned-book drives and reading groups in defiance of shrinking school libraries are common; and youth anti-censorship groups like Texas’ Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) are actively shaping policy on the state level, proposing amendments to the state’s book-ban legislation and lobbying for student representation on boards of trustees. And, of course, authors have found that being banned isn’t necessarily bad for business: When one of graphic novelist Jerry Craft’s books landed on a list of titles investigated by the state of Texas for “harmful content about critical race theory,” the author saw a bounce in sales: “[P]eople want to see what all the hubbub is…. [T]hey write to me and they’re almost disappointed because there’s no big thing that they were looking for.”
Take it from a parent: Anyone whose kid wants to read, period, should be doing exactly one thing: cheering them on. (But silently, because anything else will probably backfire.) The 2023 assessment from The Nation’s Report Card (NAEP) found that an alarming 31% of 13-year-olds self-reported “never” or “hardly ever” reading for fun, up from 2020’s 29%, leagues ahead/behind the 8% reported in 1984. If that’s true, why are so many more books challenged now than ever before?
The sharp rise in book bans isn’t about protecting children any more than the reversal of Roe v. Wade is about saving babies or the persecution of trans student athletes is about passion for high-school sports. And anyone claiming a moral high ground from which to dictate how others live is even more visible when they fall. Take Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, one of the loudest proponents of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. When her husband, state Republican party chair Christian Ziegler (it’s always just so on the nose with these folks) was accused of sexual assault by a woman whom the couple often engaged for threesomes, Bridget had to endure the school-board-meeting equivalent of being pelted with rotten fruit.
If only they’d read one of the many books about the perils of flying too close to the sun. Like the PSA says: The more you know.
