“Banned Books Week” has become a joke. I call it “bland books week.” Its definition of “banned” includes being deemed inappropriate for elementary school libraries. This is at best deceptive, and it’s an excuse for not talking about books that face actual efforts to ban them. The list also includes “challenged” books; that means simply that somebody asked a library not to carry a book. Talking about real banned books would require entering real controversies.

Unless you think school libraries should carry everything down to and including hard porn, “banning” in that sense is justified in some cases. “Challenging” hardly deserves notice at all, unless it results in serious consideration of excluding a book. Whether a school library carries Captain Underpants or not isn’t an issue of freedom of the press. Whether a book can be published at all is. There are books which have actually been banned in recent US history.

A real ban

A case in point: a book whose title and author we don’t even know, because it’s banned under an SEC gag order. As a condition of settling a case, the SEC required a defendant never to suggest publicly that he was not guilty of all the charges which the SEC initially brought against him. Litigation is expensive even if you win, and it’s always risky. Many people settle under lesser charges rather than take the chance. In some of these cases, a condition of not having to fight the accusations is agreeing do be silent forever about them. He wrote a book about the case, but the Cato Institute discovered after signing a contract that it can’t publish it.

As a result, people can never get the information to decide if the government acted reasonably or not. This takes away a lot of its incentive to be reasonable. If it brought outrageous, unjustified complaints, no one can ever know. Anyone who’s concerned about banned books should be concerned about this one.

But there’s a risk in defending it. Anyone who defends the book risks being accused of defending a fraud operator. We don’t know what the book contains. We don’t know what the author did or didn’t do. Some people will reflexively assume he is guilty of serious crimes. It’s much safer to defend Captain Underpants against exclusion from a library, especially if no one was seriously considering removing it.

Banned or not?

Another case of possible book-gagging concerns a book by indicted Trump strategist Roger Stone. The book is a re-release of The Myth of Russian Collusion, with a new introduction. A federal judge ordered Stone to explain why the new introduction doesn’t violate a gag order he is under. I don’t know all the details in this case, and there’s a curious lack of search results on whether the book was stopped. Amazon is offering it “with an explosive new introduction.” If it is suppressed, it would be a case of banning a book which discusses matters of current interest, and we should at least worry about whether the ban can be justified.

In any event, books sometimes do get banned under court orders and consent decrees, and it’s a power that can easily be abused. It should be a bigger concern than whether a book is available in a K-6 school library.