When is a ban not a ban?

When you’re a rightwing propagandist, that’s when

I was recently reminded of an interesting feature of the drive to remove books about LGBTQ people and racism from schools in states like Texas and Florida.

There have been all kinds of justifications offered for these bans – for example, that the books about racism conservatives seek to ban are actually promoting “Critical Race Theory” that, as they imagine it, is a willful slander against Caucasians; and that the LGBTQ books are obscene because they’re frank about teen sexuality (notwithstanding watchers of cable and streaming TV shows have already seen much more than what the kids will see in such rightwing targets as Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen).

No one, least of all the perpetrators, believes these efforts are inspired by a sudden wave of awareness or escalation of inappropriate material in school libraries. They’re ginned up by rightwing operatives, such as the neo-Goebbels Christopher Rufo and the front group Moms for Liberty, to 1.) convince voters that Democrats, by virtue of being generally on the right side of free-speech issues, are deliberately poisoning children’s minds with filth, and 2.) trying to keep children (and adults, for that matter) from ever finding out that alternative sexualities and racism even exist — or dismissing the former as something only minorities feel and practice against whites, and the latter as sin that should be eradicated by conversion therapy.

Sometimes these agents work a twofer — as when Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a graphic novel on the injustice of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (and thereby already offensive on grounds of racism-admission), was banned in a Tennessee school district because it had, according to the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC, an obvious attempt to gin up a wingnut AARP), “inappropriate curse words and depiction of a nude character.” (The nude character is the author’s mother, who has killed herself in a bathtub.)

AMAC also advances another favorite shtick of conservatives — that the removal of the book was “not a ‘ban,’ but simply an assertion that the book contained words and themes that were not appropriate for schools to push on 14-year-olds.”

So, the kids can see the book? No, AMAC says — the school decided it “does not need to expose every student to the images and themes presented in those books at that age.”

So, the kids can’t see the book? How’s that not a ban?

AMAC’s rejoinder is repeating the quote marks around “ban,” and claiming liberals banned Huckleberry Finn and “vandalized and dismantled statues of America’s greatest heroes,” etc.

Classier conservatives have to work harder to make this shtick look good. David Seminara at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, for example, claims “The Left Twists the Meaning of ‘Book Ban.’”  First, Seminara argues, the term is scare-quote-worthy because people don’t like the sound of it:

The first definition of the word “banned” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “to prohibit especially by legal means.” So when Americans hear claims from the Left that, say, Florida governor Ron DeSantis is “banning books,” they often incorrectly take those words at face value, assuming that the books have been removed not just from school libraries but also public libraries and bookstores.

So the word is too capacious for Seminara but, instead of blaming the English language, he blames “the American Library Association and other left-leaning groups [who] define the word banned in a much broader way than the commonsense definition… The ALA has long been notoriously liberal…”

Seminara does not tell us what word more accurately describes the forced removal of books from circulation so that readers cannot see them — but he is clear that you shouldn’t call it a ban, a word that I’m sure all my readers understand the meaning of — and I don’t have to pretend you don’t — because you are able to read.

You can see lots of other examples of Seminara’s reasoning at other rightwing sites — hell, if you look up “book” and “ban” at National Review, you get dozens of similarly sputteriffic citations.

Now, what put me in mind of this, you ask? This recent ad by Virginia Republican State Senate candidate Siobhan Dunnavant, shown at top of this post.

See, she’s anti-abortion BUT! Dunnavant has exceptions for rape, incest, fetal abnormalities. and the life of the mother! So it’s not a “ban” because some people could, in her ideal state, still have abortions — just not people who, she has decided, can’t.  

And, unlike with the book don’t-call-them-bans, Dunnavant doesn’t have the excuse that the women from whom she would restrict this right are too young to have it. Neither is her decision about who can and can’t have an abortion based on Old Testament morality (the fetal abnormalities bit gives that game away).

No, her choice of who gets the right to an abortion and who doesn’t is entitely based, Dunnavant’s website reveals, on ancient GOP bullshit about how Democrats want to abort babies up to “the moment of birth” – that is, they want to prevent women from being forced to dangerously carry doomed and even dead embryos to “term.”

In other words, it’s just political hair-splitting — on the one hand, a tacit admission that there is no moral abortion-is-murder issue involved; on the other, a tacit admission that as a Republican Dunnavant has to endorse the removal of at least some women’s rights or she could never be nominated by that party.

Meanwhile, Republicans continue to show just how interested in women’s health they are enabling nightmare scenarios like this one, in which Ashley Caswell, imprisoned by the model red state of Alabama for “endangering” her fetus (conceived two months earlier) by doing meth, goes into labor and is treated worse than livestock:

In October, when her water broke [in prison] and she pleaded to be taken to a hospital, her lawyer says, officials told her to “sleep it off” and “wait until Monday” to deliver – two days away.

During nearly 12 hours of labor, staff gave her only Tylenol for her pain, the suit says, allegedly telling her to “stop screaming”, to “deal with the pain” and that she was “not in full labor.” Caswell lost amniotic fluid and blood and was alone and standing up in a jail shower when she ultimately delivered her child, according to the complaint and her medical records. She nearly bled to death, her lawyers say.

Of course, most people are long past entertaining the notion that Republicans care about either the mother or the baby; that’s why they’ve been on a losing streak since the Dobbs decision put women entirely at their mercy.

Republicans could just drop this whole insanely unpopular program — but, as Dunnavant’s subterfuge shows, they’re hamstrung by the misogynist Jesus freaks who constitute one of the GOP’s few reliable constituencies.

So the remaining course is to lie: Lie that a ban isn’t a ban, that it’s the people who are calling your ban a ban who are the liars; what you’re doing is — well, it’s just “common sense,” as one of Dunnavant’s shills in the ad says.

It’s very like what former South Carolina governor and current Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley is trying now — except Haley’s more evasive about what her limits are (though she is of course clear that she’s against “late-term abortions”), because her race comes a year later than Dunnavant’s, so she can afford to be that evasive. For the moment.

Again, I don’t think any of you good people are fooled by this — but it doesn’t hurt to recall from time to time what the racket is, and to articulate it for people who may not be paying close attention.