Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, November 12, 2021, reports a dramatic increase of censorship in U.S. schools and libraries this year partly fueled by fears of marginalized groups about critical race theory. “This spreading moral panic [among the marginalized] demonstrates, yet again, why the left needs the First Amendment,” writes Goldberg, “even if the veneration of free speech has fallen out fashion among some progressives. Absent a societal commitment to free expression, the question of who can speak becomes purely a question of power, and in much of this country, power belongs to the right.”
Writer Christopher Noxon, Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2021, notes a move to ban books in Virginia Beach, Virginia where “Good Trouble,” a book he wrote about the civil rights movement sans sex and profanity, is on the chopping block. Noxon writes that conservatives are likely objecting to the idea in “Good Trouble” that “Civil rights didn’t begin with Rosa Parks and it didn’t end with the Civil Rights Act. The story of oppression and resistance is as old as the country, and as current as today’s news.”