Editor's Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
A year ago, a religious extremist stabbed Salman Rushdie multiple times at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. The attack occurred just as the world-renowned novelist took the stage to talk about how the United States represents a safe haven for exiled writers around the world. The wounds he suffered nearly killed him.
In May, during his first public appearance after an arduous recovery, he accepted the PEN America Centenary Courage Award. During his remarks, he didn't hold back about the attack on free expression underway in a certain Southern state.
"The attack on books, the attack on teaching, the attack on libraries in — how could I put this? — Florida, has never been more dangerous, never been more important to fight," Rushie warned.
We can only wish that what happens in Florida would stay in Florida. Sadly, the president of the American Library Association, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, relayed bad news to PBS Newshour this spring.
"What the numbers are showing, the really unprecedented jump in the number of books being challenged, reflects organized political activity by advocacy groups like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn In Education, and has resulted in the real depopulation of many library shelves, particularly in some states like Florida and Texas, where we're getting reports of school boards removing hundreds of books at one time," she said.
And just what kind of books are on the 451-degree pyre?
"We're seeing challenges primarily to books that elevate the voices of those who have traditionally been marginalized in society, particularly books about gay, queer, transgender persons," Caldwell-Stone added.
Unsatisfied with banning books from schools and from prisons, the Texas Legislature and Gov. Greg Abbott in June passed House Bill 900, which will apply to any private bookstore that might sell to a school library.
"Not later than September 1st of each year, each library material vendor shall submit to the Texas Education Agency (TEA) an updated list of library material rated as sexually explicit or sexually relevant sold by the vendor to a school district or open-enrollment charter school," the law reads.
Corporate America has not needed much assistance in killing off community bookstores, one by one, but the Texas GOP has lent a hand nonetheless. To comply with this new law, bookstore employees must go back and read every book that their store may have ever sold to a public school to — in the jargon of the text — "perform a necessarily highly fact-specific contextual analysis" as they hunt for potential smut.
More technically, the law applies to any "patently offensive" description or portrayal of "sexual conduct" - whether in a song, movie, painting or book. Just take a moment to ponder how broad such an injunction is. The Iliad and Odyssey, Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, Picasso, Rubens, the friggin' Beatles: what works of literature, art or music cannot be said to include potentially offensive, possibly sexual content?
And rather than trusting teachers, parents and elected school board members to assess what's age-appropriate for students, Texas has now outsourced the full-time job of censorship to your local bookshop, likely already struggling in a marketplace dominated by online retailers.
Austin's BookPeople, the largest independent bookstore in Texas, BlueWillow Bookshop in Houston, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, and the Authors Guild have jointly sued to stop enforcement of the law.
"The Book Ban's passage has already led to school districts halting the purchase of school library books," their petition states. "If booksellers do not submit a list of their ratings, the State sanctions them by prohibiting them from selling any books to public schools."
And what if the government disagrees with a store's case-by-case literary interpretation?
"Booksellers that refuse to adopt the TEA's 'corrected rating' are publicly shamed on the TEA's website as booksellers that have disobeyed the government's wishes," the suit explains.
Remember your teacher rolling in the blessed TV cart and showing the movie Braveheart? When the Scottish armies lift their kilts and moon the English, would that constitute "a lewd exhibition of the genitals" as stipulated in Texas Penal Code, Section 43.21, and requiring a vendor label?
The law also covers "depictions of excretory activities," despite poop jokes being a staple of storytelling meant for children since the invention of children.
Even in a high school library intended for young adults, if a work is "pervasively vulgar" or an "affront to current community standards of decency" or if "a reasonable person would find that the material intentionally panders to the reader," whatever that means, then the offending content might be traced back to where it was purchased.
Half Price Books, which has five stores in San Antonio, has adopted an admirably defiant stance. President Kathy Doyle Thomas wrote that her company "will not stand for a law in Texas that would require our booksellers to participate in the censorship of books. Not only is the law unconstitutional, the 'contemporary community standard' rating criteria is vague and completely subjective to each person."
Author Kurt Vonnegut was too kind in calling censorship advocates "smut hunters." Instead, they are destroyers of worlds of meaning. And when one can't defeat rival worldviews on their own terms, it often helps to change the subject.
The actual target of McCarthyism wasn't communism, it was racial integration and the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. The actual target of anti-wokism is neither Critical Race Theory nor radical gender ideology, it's public education itself, which is why Gov. Greg Abbott has been so busy pushing privatization schemes.
This book-ratings regime has little to do with protecting schoolchildren from sexual trauma and predation. Instead, it has everything to do with extending the reach of the state outside the schoolhouse gates to silence the voices of gay and trans authors, artists and allies, who disturb and disgust religious conservatives with a frightening future of acceptance and inclusion.
For the next generation, however, the moral panics that drive voter turnout in today's Republican Party primaries are as passé as long-dead controversies over interracial marriage or gay adoption.
Without needing to be told or lectured, today's youth will follow Rushdie's example, as should we all.
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