Book Banning

BY KATIE MAHLE [lead writer]

The Indiana senate is contemplating a new book banning bill, allowing parents to report a book in efforts to ultimately have the book banned. According to the bill, any reported book leaves the librarian, along with a board, to review and decide whether the book be removed from the library, be restricted to an age-limited section of the library, or the complaint be denied through a written response to the parent. This bill has been resurfacing since 2020 and has since come back to the statehouse on Feb. 28th of this year.

According to the NWI Times, State Sen. Liz Brown of Fort Wayne said the measure ensures “100% transparency” when it comes to school library holdings and gives parents across Indiana a clear procedure for identifying and potentially removing

“When we follow guidelines, we look at professional journals, like Kirkus Review, and that will tell us what age groups we’ll look at. We’ll look at young adult books, too. We look at the age group and what is age appropriate,” Secretary of the Learning Commons Chris Genovese said.

Topics presented on the banned book list deal with subjects deemed inappropriate for various age groups. However, diversity has a home in books. The public library is a place where people of the community go so that they can read books they see themselves in - to discover