Fearmongering is endangering our right to read | Opinion

Paula M. Krebs, of Providence, is the executive director of the Modern Language Association, a professional association for 20,000 language and literature faculty members and researchers.

While Sen. Jack Reed is leading the national movement to support school libraries with the Right to Read Act, some Rhode Island state legislators in his own party have swallowed the extreme right’s fearmongering rhetoric about reading and are trying to say that lawmakers know better than librarians how to run a library.

In House Bill 6324, Democratic Reps. Samuel Azzinaro, Deborah Fellela, Arthur Corvese, Patricia Serpa, Gregory Costantino, Charlene Lima and Edward Cardillo, along with Republican Rep. Patricia Morgan, identify reading, not guns or violence, as a threat to Rhode Island schoolchildren. They seek to remove books that they identify as “obscene” from school libraries and to send school librarians to jail for allowing children access to those books. The targets of such legislation, in Rhode Island and in so many other states, are books that acknowledge the existence of sexuality, especially books that discuss or depict lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or nonbinary sexual or gender identities.

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The Rhode Island legislators label such books “pornographic.” In talking to The Journal about the legislation last week, Rep. Morgan explicitly named particular books. These were not pornography — books that aim to produce sexual arousal. They were books aimed at Young Adult readers that included discussions of sexuality that is not heterosexuality. And that is why these legislators want to jail librarians — for allowing teen readers to read books that include the possibility of non-heterosexual lives, emotions, dilemmas, experiences.

Fear of reading is very real in the United States at the moment. As the head of an association of literature and language educators, I hear stories every day about attempts to curtail college and secondary school faculty members’ and librarians’ rights to exercise their professional judgment in their jobs. Legislatures in Florida, Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, and many other states have decided that they, not professional educators, should get to decide what students get to read, discuss, or even say aloud.

In Ohio, teachers can’t say that racism even exists. In Virginia, you can’t teach Toni Morrison. If you’re teaching in Florida, the governor has made sure that you “Don’t Say Gay.” In these book-banning states, legislatures, not professional educators, are determining curricular content. Librarians and teachers can no longer assign or make available materials that allow students to think critically about the world around them and their own choices.

And now Rhode Island wants to join that club.

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As a lesbian mother, I remember when my daughter was in preschool in Providence and how important a book like "Heather Has Two Mommies" was to her. It was important for her to see her life represented and it was important for her schoolmates to see it, too. But I also remember how school boards and legislators were trying to ban that book. Poor Heather is still at the top of banned book lists, 25 years after my daughter finished preschool, because some folks want to protect children from the knowledge that toddlers with two mommies exist.

Trying to stop someone else from reading about things that make you uncomfortable is a terrible impulse. Rhode Island as a settler colony was founded by Roger Williams on principles of freedom of critical thought. I can’t help thinking that Roger Williams would no more approve of throwing librarians in jail than Jack Reed does.

As Rhode Islanders, we must defend school librarians’ professional expertise, judgment, and rights around these books. If this law is enacted, books about sexual and gender preference will not be the only books to be banned in Rhode Island.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Trying to stop someone else from reading about things that make you uncomfortable is a terrible impulse.