Sep 24, 2022 3 min read

Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, invented bifocals, the lightning rod, the glass harmonica and the Franklin stove, and more than earned his spot as one of the most renowned and revered Pennsylvanians.

Franklin’s wide-ranging interests and thirst for knowledge were the products of a curious and restless mind, nurtured through a love of the written word. Franklin himself once said that, when he was young, what money he could scrounge together would go toward purchasing books.

It’s almost always unwise to make assumptions about how someone who has been dead for a long, long time would feel about contemporary events, but we feel comfortable making this assertion – Franklin would not have been at all happy with the news that Pennsylvania is a national leader in book banning.

According to data released this week by the advocacy group PEN America to mark Banned Books Week, Pennsylvania is one of four states, alongside Texas, Florida and Tennessee, that experienced the most incidents of book banning in the 2021-22 school year. From all indications, the enthusiasm for restricting books has not abated. According to the American Library Association (ALA), the number of attempts to ban books in 2022 so far is close to the total for 2021, and last year was a high-water mark.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, told the Associated Press, “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s both the number of challenges and the kinds of challenges. It used to be a parent had learned about a given book and had an issue with it. Now we see campaigns where organizations are compiling lists of books without even reading or looking at them.”

Hankering to ban books is bad enough, but not even looking at them before denying others the chance to access them is pretty bad.

In fairness, there have been calls to restrict books by some on the left, who object to racist language, the way race is handled, or how Black characters are portrayed in such undisputed classics as “The Grapes of Wrath,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” But, overwhelmingly, the right has been much more aggressive in going after books, with volumes touching on race, racism and sexual identity high on their target list. Some school librarians have decided to quit in the face of persistent harassment, threats or intimidation. In some locations, some residents have taken to turning up armed at previously sleepy library board meetings.

America has endured waves of panic and irrationality many times in its past, from the Salem witch trials to the commie-hunting hysteria of McCarthyism in the 1950s. These things come and go, but not without fair-minded people standing up for reason and decency. When books are banned, you’re limiting knowledge and ideas that could help young people become knowledgeable adults, better citizens and better decision makers.

Book bans don’t help communities. They harm them.