Critics continue to sound the alarm over Project 2025, a Christian Nationalist scheme to impose theocratic laws on America. Most recently, Ron Charles, a critic for The Washington Post’s “Book World” section, outlined how the backers of Project 2025 yearn to ban books and attack librarians. It’s disturbing.
In the column, Charles explains that the backers of Project 2025 are relying on a familiar tactic: Any book they don’t like is labeled “pornographic.”
As we’ve noted on this blog before, obscenity has a legal definition, and none of the books targeted by Project 2025’s book banners come anywhere near it. The volumes targeted often deal with LGBTQ+ themes or impart factual information about human sexuality.
Charles puts it well, observing, “Keep in mind the books that have been condemned as pornographic over the last few years by self-appointed gatekeepers of public morality: Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’ Khaled Hosseini’s ‘The Kite Runner,’ Judy Blume’s ‘Forever’ and so many more cherished classics – enough to fuel a pyre that could be seen from the heavens.”
The term “pornography” is used to stir up the uninformed and smear librarians and educators. Project 2025, Charles notes, goes so far as to assert that librarians and teachers should be forced to register as sex offenders for purveying pornography.
“Demonizing teachers and librarians like this is ludicrous and shameful,” Charles writes. “Such language seeps from the same sewer of intolerance that inspired Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to call for Salman Rushdie’s assassination.”
Despite what you may have heard, Project 2025 has not been shut down. Its backers, which include the Heritage Foundation and a panoply of the most extreme Christian Nationalist organizations in America, would like you to believe they’re pulling back – but that’s only because they learned that Americans are recoiling at their oppressive agenda.
Be assured that the leaders of Project 2025 and their minions continue their schemes. And high among them is a plan to throw mud on the hard-working people who staff our country’s libraries, followed by a purge of books that Christian Nationalists have summarily decided your children should not read.
