Political parties seem irrelevant here. Let educators rather than politicians decide which books should be in a school library.

Which laws did Democrats pass calling for books to be removed from schools? I admit I'm not always paying attention, but I don't remember any.

Banning should be an extreme measure only applied in some extremely limited form for the shortest duration possible, if ever. For instance when the book is directly being used to institute violence or hate. While porn should be restricted, it should be in the hands of parents, not the state. Same with abortion, a deeply personal matter, not in the hands of the state or whatever some church things, just because they think they are right. Justice should be blind, not carry a bible or creed.

It should appear evident, and a pretty apolitical stance, but here we are.

Associating good vs evil with politics and perhaps worse, political party's themselves is a problem.

Why do people associate these disparate things? Because they've been trained to...

Sadly, this tribalism is at the root of most of our civil disagreements these days.

>Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive", while republicans were the ones who opposed book banning in schools

Source? I was an adult alive 20 years ago, that wasn't a thing.

> Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive"

And it was rightfully opposed by the majority and by folks who understand the tenability of our rights to the whims of authoritarians, as many, many, many of the actions of the current administration should be.

I mean you're comparing the color purple and fucking mein Kampf or the literary equivalent of song of the south.

Come on man. These aren't the same thing. Not everything is the same as everything else because you can torture the principle to vaguely fit both.

Can you be more specific? What books were being banned on the state level for being culturally insensitive?

> One side wants to ban books with two men kissing and the other books that use the wrong pronouns.

One of these things is happening and the other is not (no one is banning or endeavors to ban anyone from using the wrong pronouns).

Apparently, recently this is new and exclusively Republican policy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...

Republicans are seeking to ban thousands of books nationwide.

With these "both sides" arguments why is it always "heres thing one, which is definitely happening and has been for decades. And here's thing two, which could hypothetically happen but never has and almost certainly never will"

I mean, it's absurd. It feels like a psyop. Is this a targeted propaganda campaign?

Stop trying to both sides. I see crazed MAGAs banning books here and I would bet if we look at numbers the crazies censor at least an order of magnitude more than whatever you're referencing. I can't think of an example of books being banned by non rightwingers, but will look into it now to learn.

"Wrong" pronouns -- what does this even mean?

I feel like there are a lot of conservatives who are unaware about what sex and gender actually are, and rather than looking for understanding they prefer to mock because they are lazy and chose the easy route rather than understanding other people.

Real rough to have a society when one side just wants to openly mock the other.

Which books on the list covered in this article are equivalents of Mein Kampf in mid-century Germany? I'll save you the effort. The answer is "none of them." That makes it pretty black and white for me. There's not some massive overlap here that makes it all shades of gray. The two situations and the works of literature are entirely different and the Germany case is an abberation, an exception, and hardly a good basis for drawing global conclusions. It is black and white. Either you're for or against the wholesale banning of books or you're for it. Countering with "but this one time in this one place" is hardly convincing.

It's not actually banned in Germany. Though I think the only edition you can buy here is annotated, which does seem like a good idea.

Being German I think it's important to point out that possession of Mein Kampf or reading it was never banned, the idea wasn't to hide some evil esoteric secret knowledge from the German people, to a large extent it was a pragmatic decision because the state did not want Neo-Nazis to benefit financially from the sales of Hitlers legacy, so they just held on to the copyright and didn't print it. There are now since 2016 annotated academic versions of it.

Also you have to have a very cartoonish view of people think we're like the Hulk and turn green the moment you come across a copy of Mein Kampf, denazification was a broad cultural project, not a binary thing about one text.

The primary struggle with that book is actually reading it because it's simply horrid. If you wanted to prevent Germans from turning to nationalism you'd probably have taken Thomas Mann's political writings off the shelves.