Elana K. Arnold

Because she won’t ban books

As a writer for and about children and teens, I’ve found my books on an increasing number of “banned” and “challenged” lists. Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump presidency, conflates literary works that explore topics such as gender, sexuality, and sexual assault with pornography, and promises to make them illegal.

Here’s the language, taken directly from the Project 2025 document: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children… has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women… The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”

The current panic around “pornography in books for kids” (along with the anti-CRT scare and the anti-trans moral panic) is today’s iteration of the moral panics we’ve cycled through in the past; satanic panic, stranger danger, the Red Scare, and even the Salem witch trials are earlier versions of the same basic movement. What do all these moral panics have in common? They identify a scapegoat from a marginalized community—women, people of color, queer people—and then leverage the fears of the majority to label these people as dangerous and othered.

From a distance, moral panics seem almost silly. How could people really have believed that witches were taking over their town, strangers were mining neighborhood sandboxes with AIDS-infected needles, or Dungeons & Dragons was a satanic-cult recruitment tool? But we don’t have time to wait for the smoke to clear. Because in the meanwhile, real people—authors, teachers, librarians, and children and teens themselves—are the movement’s casualties.

Kamala Harris said: “We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books. Can you imagine?” She and Tim Walz understand the true threats to our children, and they aren’t in the pages of a library book. A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for keeping rationality in the White House.

Elana K. Arnold is an award-winning author of books for and about children and teens, many of which have been challenged and banned across the country.