John Oliver on public libraries: ‘Another front in the ongoing culture war’

John Oliver defended public libraries on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, as the local institutions have “become another front in the ongoing culture war” with attacks on their funding, their staff and their collections.

The American Library Association documented efforts to censor over 4,240 unique book titles in schools and libraries in 2023, the highest level they have ever recorded, up 92% from the previous year. Library staff have also experienced a huge increase in harassment, with some baselessly accused of pedophilia for allowing certain books to be checked out.

The supreme court has recognized that speech cannot be suppressed solely to protect children from ideas of images that a legislative body thinks are unsuitable for them, although there is an exception for “obscenity”, defined for minors as material that appeals to “prurient interests”, is “offensive to prevailing standards” or “lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value”.

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Yet some have tried to apply that standard “incredibly broadly”, said Oliver. A city council in Huntington Beach, California, for example, ordered all books with “sexual content” to be moved to the adults section, including children’s books introducing puberty and the title Everybody Poops.

“Increasingly, the list of books challenged at libraries can be suspiciously similar,” Oliver explained. “And that is because challenges are often coming from highly organized groups, often conservative and extremely religious, who are compiling and sharing lists of books to oppose.”

Before 2021, the vast majority of challenges sought to remove or restrict a single book at a time. But now 93% of them attempt to censor multiple titles, and over half target 100 or more titles at a time.

“You do get the sense that people who want to censor these books can have no real idea of what’s inside them or, indeed, if they’re even at the libraries they’re protesting at all,” Oliver said, citing a case in Idaho where activists demanded that more 400 books be removed from the library, even though it already didn’t have them. “As far as protests go, that’s about as meaningful as marching to the Hollywood sign to demand that Frankie Muniz return his Oscar for Schindler’s List,” he joked. “He’s not there, he wasn’t in that, and the very fact that you’re protesting this tells me you’re probably not familiar with the material.”

Numerous complaints note that parents haven’t even read the books, or quote them out of context. Activists at the Idaho library also asked the library to judge books under “God’s standards and not of the world’s standards”.

“You know God – the freak known for building a nude garden he could watch all day,” Oliver quipped. “The guy who commissioned the construction of an all-animal fuck boat, and who sat back and watched while his own son got nailed. Oh, I’m sorry, am I misunderstanding the Bible by taking things out of context? Forgive me, I haven’t read it.”

Oliver looked at the most challenged book of the last three years: Gender Queer, a graphic young adult novel about struggling with gender identity, whose own author said it should be available to young adults, but not kids. “Some books aren’t appropriate for five-year-olds, but might be if you’re 16, because those are two very different phases of life that we don’t treat the same way,” said Oliver. “It’s why a 16-year-old driving a car is perfectly legal, and a five-year-old driving a car is a news story.

“And yet for some, keeping books like Gender Queer out of the kids section – where again, it isn’t – still isn’t enough,” he continued. Some parents argued that if it was on a library shelf, kids would find it, but as one exasperated librarian in Louisiana put it: “If your child is in the library by itself, or theirself, they probably have a phone. In which case, my library is the least of your problems.”

“Right. This entire debate basically ends the second you remember the existence of the internet,” Oliver added. “If your child has a phone, they already have access to the most sexualized images you can imagine.”

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Surveying the landscape of library challenges, Oliver concluded: “Protecting libraries is a fight, but it’s also winnable. It just means standing up to all these bullshit attacks whenever they occur, and they are occurring a lot.” The Alabama house, for example, just advanced a bill allowing for librarians to be arrested for the content they allow on shelves, and Arkansas and Oklahoma have already passed laws making it possible to prosecute librarians for distributing “obscene” content.

“This is all madness,” said Oliver. “And it speaks to the need for libraries to be vigorously defended. And I know it is not shocking that an episode of this show would advocate to support your local libraries. It’s pretty much implicit in our whole vibe.

“But depending on where you live, you might need to pay attention if people start showing up at your local library board meeting and reading ear-catching parts of young adult books,” he continued. “While it is understandable for parents to want to have a say in what their kids can check out from the library, it is not their right to have a say in what can be checked out at all.”