Commentary: Hanover book bans portend a dangerous trend

According to a new report by a state commission on banned books in Virginia schools, Hanover County Public Schools removed the book “Medical Discoveries: Medical Breakthroughs and the People Who Developed Them” from libraries sometime between July 2020 and March 2025.

Censored, too, was a book entitled “Sexual health information for teens: health tips about sexual development,” described by its publisher as “basic consumer health information for teens about puberty, sexuality, reproductive health, contraception, and disease prevention.””

Likewise jettisoned were copies of “Encyclopedia of the Human Body,” “The Way We Work: Getting to Know the Amazing Human Body,” and “The Medical Advisor: The Complete Guide to Alternative and Conventional Treatments.”

The conservative library review movement in Virginia’s public schools, which has galvanized during the tenure of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, purports to be about protecting parents’ rights to know what their children read. The July report by Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) put the lie to that claim.

Book banners in schools want to dictate what students can learn in their classrooms and from their libraries, regardless of what individual parents and guardians believe. No greater violation of adults’ child-rearing choices exists than the moral arbitration right-wing extremists hope heap on them.

JLARC found that 63% of Virginia public schools removed no books from their libraries. That good news was tempered by the fact that one in three had removed at least one book. But the real bad news is that the public-school book ban movement is just getting up to speed, as holier-than-you evangelical Christians try to take over school boards across the country. We’ve seen it in Pennsylvania, Florida, and other states. As many of those types of people gain positions of power in the administration of President Donald Trump, violations of parents’ First Amendment rights by radical theocrats seem likely to accelerate.

Hanover County, which lies about 30 miles north of Richmond, serves as a cautionary tale. Hanover schools are governed by a conservative majority and the school board is appointed, not elected like most school districts in the state. The JLARC report revealed that Hanover accounted for 36% of all “book removal actions” in the state. Hanover removed 125 titles from its schools from July 2020 until March 2025, the report found.

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This is the last step in a progression that begins with challenging content in library books, then pulling them from shelves and requiring guardian consent to check them out, and finally, removing them from libraries entirely.

Letting political and religious ideologues control children’s reading choices leads to censoring their exposure to prize-winning literature and reflects obvious prejudices against books about racism and LGBTQ+ issues. It sacrifices scientific knowledge to faith and, in some cases, ignorance. Hanover proves that.

The conservative attack on diversity, equity and inclusion – all fundamental American values – will lead to a literal whitewash of U.S. history and doesn’t serve anyone who believes that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Censorship to shape politics and culture like what is happening in Hanover often finds its natural conclusion in symbolic or actual book burnings, like those that famously fired up Hitler’s power in Germany.

Banned books in Hanover don’t just include books about gender or sexual identity. The list also includes literary classics by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Booker Prize winner Maragaret Atwood, and National Book Award winner Kurt Vonnegut.

For would-be book banners, a single sex scene in hundreds of pages or a suggestion of white racism now serves as justification for exclusion from a school library.

As that continues, taboos grow. Hanover County dumped “The Freedom Writers Diary.” The book tells the story of a California teacher who taught students about the Holocaust by making them read and write about “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

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To get an idea of how far-gone Hanover is, the county Board of Supervisors removed references to school library censorship from a certificate it gave a Hanover student who won a national Girl Scout award.  Kate Lindley received a “Freedom to Read” award from the Girl Scouts for establishing a website and a series of “Banned Book Nooks” in the county where students could read books the school board had removed from libraries.

As she accepted her certificate from the Board of Supervisors, Lindley showed more class than the governing body.

“You have shown the world that you are afraid to call something what it is, be that a banned book or a deselected one,” she told the board’s conservative majority. “Thank you for this recognition.”

What the rest of us must recognize and resist is the assault on our rights by people who, without our consent, would deprive Virginia kids of access to books like “Jesus Land: A Memoir.” A New York Times bestseller, it tells the true story of a 16-year-old white girl and her Black adopted brother trying to survive a brutal, violent fundamentalist upbringing. It could be that Hanover County banned the book because it does not cast Christian fundamentalism in the light that evangelicals want it seen.

That is the polar opposite of parents’ rights.

by Jim Spencer, Virginia Mercury

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