What’s a ban? What’s not a ban? Progressive and liberal media narratives have no consistent definition.
Consider book bans. The “conservative states are banning books” panic conveniently forgets the endless progressive efforts to get books unpublished, banned from marketplaces, rewritten, or removed from curricula. But set that aside: a major source for claims about books being banned is PEN America’s reporting and statistics on book bans. The problem, as Abigail Anthony explains, is that many of the so-called “banned” books are only banned in the sense that “access to a book is restricted or diminished,” including situations in which “a book that was previously available to all now requires parental permission, or is restricted to a higher grade level than educators initially determined.”
In other words: It’s a “ban” to decide that a book is not appropriate for all ages, even if the book is universally available for age-appropriate readers, and even if this amounts to little more than moving a book to a different shelf within the same school library. Even more incoherently, it’s a “ban” to take a book that was already age- or grade-restricted and change the range to a higher age or grade. If you take the uber-libertarian view that even sexually explicit books and books with nudity and graphic violence should be available to all ages, then these books were already “banned” under PEN America’s definition — how can changing that restriction be a new ban?
“Ban” is a powerful word, so partisans use it expansively to refer to any sort of restriction on things they like in order to imply to people who don’t read far past the headline that the restriction is much broader than it is. For example, we routinely hear the phrase “abortion ban” used when only late-term abortions are prohibited, and even those prohibitions have exceptions. Democrats insist that these are only a tiny fraction of abortions, yet they simultaneously say that any move to stop them is an “abortion ban.”
We’re told that it’s a “ban on transgender student athletes” when young men who identify themselves as women are allowed to play men’s sports but not women’s sports.
What happens when it’s a restriction on something they don’t like? We’re endlessly told that nobody wants to ban guns, even when Democrats propose taking the best-selling guns in the country off the market.
We had a particularly egregious example when federal regulators at the Consumer Product Safety Commission began discussing bans on new gas stoves. Chuck Schumer: “You have to laugh at the ‘gas stove ban’ narrative being cooked up by the MAGA GOP . . . Nobody is taking away your gas stove.” The Associated Press: “FACT FOCUS: Biden administration isn’t banning gas stoves.” Of course, Los Angeles had already banned them in new construction, and New York followed with a state law doing the same. This time, the argument was that it’s not a ban if you can’t buy a new one, so long as the government isn’t literally pulling the existing stoves out of your kitchen. Try telling PEN America to adopt that as a definition of book bans.