Books that get banned – historically and now in many, many states in the U.S. – are banned not because they are immoral (under accepted and promoted … - Michael Bronski

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Books that get banned – historically and now in many, many states in the U.S. – are banned not because they are immoral (under accepted and promoted religious ideologies) but because they challenge a current orthodoxy. Often this orthodoxy is about sexuality, gender and sometimes race. But this is only part of what causes this – for the most part what we call “art” (good or bad art) is a product of the imagination. The nature of the imagination is to, well “imagine” – to think outside of the frames of the real, the material world, what is possible, what is considered acceptable. So this is the reason why “art” gets challenged most often by censorship --- it is, or can be, by its nature, a challenge to the status quo to what we are expected to accept as “normal".