2023-06-14 00:31:26
With our correspondent in Washington, Guillaume Naudin
Banning books from public libraries is the goal of Democratic Gov. Jay Robert Pritzker. He considers it censorship. For him, it is dictatorial regimes that act in this way, not democracies. The new law, which will come into force on 1 January next, obliges libraries to adopt in their statutes the charter of the national association of libraries, under penalty of no longer receiving public funding from the State. This charter specifies that no document should be banned or suppressed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval or the origins and opinions of their authors. This same association warns of the increase in requests for bans. They practically doubled between 2021 and 2022.
In total, more than 2,500 publications are the subject of complaints. For the most part, these are works by authors from the LGBT communities and authors of color. Unsurprisingly, these ban requests are occurring in states that have such laws in place: Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina. A list that Illinois clearly has no intention of joining.
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