1. They often give prominent position to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Are thugs roaming the streets, breaking into homes and searching for contraband copies? No. It’s simply that, from time to time, some black parents dare to “challenge” the judgement of school officials who make the book mandatory reading, despite the fact that it has vicious remarks about black people that could hurt small children. The same is true of other parents protesting violence and promiscuity in the books they kids are being forced to read.

I will be blunt. What those parents are protesting is an evil just as bad as censorship: state indoctrination. Both censorship and indoctrination are characteristic of repressive regimes and (in our country) bureaucracies run amuck. These parents deserve praise rather than condemnation.

2. The displays I have seen also seem to pay little attention to real censorship, the kind nasty governments impose on their cowed populations. A few years ago, library organizations in the U.S. refused to denounce Cuba for imprisoning those who had libraries of books banned by the government. The librarians’ excuse? Well, it seems that those running this libraries didn’t have degrees in library science, so these weren’t really libraries. Pitiful.

The real reason is, of course, that the left almost never finds the time to criticize repressions by those further left. That was all too obvious when Reagan gave his famous “Evil Empire” speech. “Evil empire, what evil empire?” liberals said. And odd as it seems, more recently the censorship of Islamic states also gets little attention. It’s almost that they like real censorship much like they so clearly love indoctrination, at least when they do it.

3. The Bible, the most censored book in the public arena in the U.S., rarely makes these lists. That’s odd, because far more often that the unfortunate Huck Finn, some school or other will be telling a student that he or she can’t read the Bible, even on their own time riding to school or between classes, never mind in a commencement address. Taken to court, these school officials always lose, but they keep trying. Since censorship is really about the books the government bans, this sort of behavior should go to the top of any banned books list. Instead, it’s almost never mentioned.

I’m sure many of these people mean well, but there is clearly an elitist, anti-democratic agenda at work here. Parents, concerned about their children, get treated as Nazis, while school officials, behaving precisely like their counterparts in 1930s Germany, can censor at will without being denounced. Worst of all, the most repressive regime in the Western hemisphere, Cuba, gets a free pass.