Book Banning — Ignorance is Bliss

Michael Castengera
2 min readDec 19, 2023

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It is the ‘Bible’ of the book publishing world and it has just anointed two new prophets.

(Whew, I admit it — that’s a little heavy-duty analogy. Maybe it’s because I’ve been catching up on all the great stories on Publishers Weekly, as I look at trying my writing hand again.)

The two women are ‘Indie’ book-sellers, a job that is not appreciated or understood enough. They stood up against the ignorance that has infected Texas and too many other states, led by the mis-named group — “Moms for Liberty.” The group claims to be “unifying, educating and empowering parents.” To do what?

— Unify people in their hatred of anything different.

— Teach people that having a varied education is bad.

— Empower people to grow up to be misogynists. .

They have chapters around the country from Texas where the legislature passed a bill requiring all booksellers to rate all books based on some very vague standards to Florida where members of a local school board are trying to oust the founder of the biggest group there because — get this — her husband is accused of raping a woman that she and her husband had hired to have a sex threesome. Proof of just how sick these people are.

The bottomline is that the people who want to ban books have a right, painful as it may be, to raise their children to be ignoramuses, afraid of anybody different from them, and full of hate for anything that they don’t understand. But inflicting their sickness on other people is just plain — WRONG.

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Michael Castengera

Newspaper reporter turned TV reporter turned media manager turned consultant turned teacher