National Unity and the Colorado Supreme Court

We are a polarized nation, we all know this. In that circumstance, as a matter of our continuance, we have to keep from pushing each other too hard, too roughly. We are a nation of 330 million people with different views. We can move forward and hold on only with patience and respect. When you’re extreme for your side you get an extreme reaction, and wind up living in a world of endless pushback.

Maybe you’re a nice and earnest public-school librarian eager to show identification with and sympathy for the marginalized. You are part of a sector, public education, that has grown more culturally progressive, and culturally insistent, and are immersed in the for-profit publishing world, which is even more so. So you order and put in your school library, to show your identification with and sympathy for the marginalized and different and lonely, some books highly focused on questions of sexuality, including one that’s a sort of LGBTQ how-to manual. The parents will find out, feel honest indignation—“I need my 14-year-old son to be taught math, not how to have oral sex!”—and in their anger, and having shown up at a school board meeting after working a second shift and been patronized as yahoos by board members, and not knowing what they’re doing because they haven’t lived lives focused on literature, come up with a long list of books to be “banned,” meaning available everywhere on earth but the school library. It’s long because they have no confidence in the good faith of the school board and know it will sneak some through. And on the list is not only “Gender Queer” but “To Kill a Mockingbird,” because it sounds unpleasant, and “Crime and Punishment,” because it sounds like something funded by George Soros. Then the big newspapers hear about it and assign reporters to write how stupid these local right-wingers are, and the parents see it and hate the fake-news media more than ever.