First Iowa banned the books, then ....

This quote from James Baldwin (1924-1987) seems like an appropriate way to begin another week as Iowa's public school districts struggle to figure out how to comply with Senate File 496, which bans books with written and visual depictions of sex acts from school libraries (religious texts exempted) and prohibits instruction and materials involving “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” for students in grades kindergarten through sixth.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

Baldwin wrote this in 1964 as part of a life narrative he provided for the program of a television broadcast and it was republished in The New York Times.

That was the year before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, an anniversary observed yesterday, August 6th. For those who have forgotten, that act outlawed discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests, and still in place.

I graduated from Russell High School during 1964 and enrolled at the University of Iowa that fall. 

Like many others, I had read voraciously, continued to do so --- and still do, although much of what I read these days is conjured up on a screen rather than on paper.

From my vantage point now, many years later, it's been fascinating to watch fundamentalist Christianity, now largely political and not especially religious, swallow the Republican party and shift its course backward toward fascism.

One aspect of that, of course, has been the age-old strategy of banning and burning books that allow young (and older) readers to learn about themselves and open for exploration the world and its fascinating mix of people, cultures and philosophies.

Bans and burning tend to be counterproductive, however, raising as they do the profile of and renewing and increasing interest in what is targeted. And youngsters these days tend to go online for information --- not the school library.

So the real threat here probably is not to literature and ideas --- but to Iowa's public education system, something the Iowa Legislature can and apparently wants to reduce to shambles. Witness new legislation this year that will pour public funds into private schools.

Brighter young Iowans will continue to thrive --- read, think and explore --- but increasingly I suppose elsewhere. We've exported our best and brightest for years, but generally were able to hold onto many of  them into young adulthood because of our excellent schools.

That appears to be ending now --- stay tuned for Iowa legislative attempts to decimate our public universities.

And it seems likely that somewhere in the basement of one of those fundamentalist megachurches in Des Moines or elsewhere, the good old boys and girls are trying to figure out how to roll back the Voting Rights Act of 1965, too.