The Faux-Moral Hustle of the Modern Book Burners

​Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is just the latest political pundit to hop on the bandwagon of Trailer-Park Tories queued up to burn books in the public square.

​I personally lay this at the feet of Ron DeSantis. The common-sense solution to reading material has always been simple: if you don’t like a book, don’t read it. If you believe a specific title is inappropriate for your child, go down to the school, have an adult conversation with their teacher, and request an alternative assignment. But attempting to dictate intellectual access for every single child, parent, and individual in an entire community isn’t just heavy-handed authoritarianism, it is fundamentally un-American.

​Do you want to know what one of the most explicitly rated, raw, and graphic texts in circulation actually is? It’s the Bible. There is a very specific reason you have almost certainly never heard certain chapters preached from the pulpit on a sunny Sunday morning. That omission was deliberate. But boy howdy, take an honest look at the unabridged scripture, it gets wildly explicit. If children can have full, unrestricted access to the canonical violence, sexuality, and brutality found across biblical text, then Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha is an innocent walk in the park.

​Don't pee on our collective leg and call it rain. These politicians are feigning righteous morality, and nobody with an ounce of critical thinking actually buys the act. If we genuinely believe the Bill of Rights still carries the force of law in this country, then the First Amendment must exist in full. If it doesn't, and you are ready to discard basic constitutional protections the moment they become politically inconvenient, then go ahead and be consistent: turn over the guns, too.

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