The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a very long document listing several problematic and worrying ideas. Amongst them, one stands out quite personally to me: its plans for banning books. More specifically, its new codified criteria for which it will ban books containing content they deem irredeemable.
Before going into the deep and murky waters of my own sordid past and why this has made me so anti-book banning, allow me to confidently say that banning books is a horrible thing that only the fallible, ignorant and weak deem agreeable.
The desire to ban books comes from an unparalleled level of ignorance and contempt for the human experience. Many of the worst leaders in history have wanted to ban books for showing traits they didn’t find admirable. And let me not mince words; these traits that demagogues deem bannable are traits or themes like homosexuality, queerness, transgenderism, being non-white and critical race theory.
They deem these things, which can’t be controlled by human beings, as worthy of banning. But since you can’t go about yelling, “burn the queers” as a politician, they settle for banning books that portray characters with any of the aforementioned distinctions.
As a literate man and a human whose queerness has always been omnipresent, I found escape in literature. I have always been a voracious reader, and thus, by fifth grade, I was already bored and over the readings assigned and gifted to me. So I went on and researched books that I wasn’t “supposed to read.” This was perhaps my moment of radicalization.
One of the first memories I have of being possessed by that unique blend of sadness and rage was going through some online articles about why many books were banned.
I always knew I was queer, it was in my blood and bones. I learned that my favorite medium of escape was not as free and vast as I thought because of that article, I learned what homophobia truly was.
Gaining awareness of the banning of books and why they were banned lit what is an insufferable fire under my ass, mainly because the only reason to ban a book is ignorance, misplaced fear or hate.
Project 2025’s criteria classifies anything that deals with queerness as pornography. If this doesn’t immediately disgust you then allow me to enlighten you as to why it’s so repellent.
By classifying these things as pornographic on the basis of containing queerness, you immediately say that there is a difference between heterosexual and cisgender literature and everything in between. This is discrimination and division, more specifically, the division that actually divides and not merely separates two thoughts.
When books containing people of color’s writings, anecdotes and critical race theory are banned, you’re telling the reader that the oppressions they face are either not worthy of being portrayed in media or that you don’t want them to learn about the issues they suffer from.
All these bans serve as the first move against vulnerable communities; they serve to silence literary voices, serve as an agenda to keep the masses ignorant and reliant and serve to sever empathy from the American people.
We must fight these bans in every way we can. This issue must transcend political discourse because the death of thought is quick and fast. The division of the masses is even faster. Book bans serve no one but the demagogues and harm only the sensible.
Garrett McEntee is a 19-year-old English sophomore from Benton, La.
