An office that shouldn’t even exist in the Education Department , which, itself, should not exist, should not be telling local schools what books they must put on their library shelves.

The Democratic liberal news media and the organized Left also need a refresher course about what “book banning” means. They should stop applying that loaded term to parents’ efforts to protect their children.

SUPREME COURT PACKING JUST THE LATEST DEMOCRATIC EFFORT TO CONTROL THE COURT

At issue is a directive to a Georgia school district from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. It is a quintessential example of federal government overreach, for it cracks down on the district for creating a “hostile environment” of legally defined student “harassment."

The directive is nonsense on every level. Usually, “harassment” involves actions expressing hostility, scorn, sexual suggestiveness, or abuse. Here, though, the Office for Civil Rights complains about the removal of materials that others deem injurious to children. The removal of books exploring sexual behavior or erotica, or ones promoting racial perspectives fraught with controversy, may or may not be wise. But an absence of ideas and depictions does not produce harassment, whether by the Office for Civil Rights or the Justice Department.

To treat the removal of certain books as an actionable civil rights violation is to roam far into the left field of legal theory. In this instance, it is a completely novel crackpot idea cooked up by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU argues that “not representing” various races or “identities” in schoolbooks can be illegal discrimination. This is wrong, and no one should be able to make a federal case out of this.

The proliferation of federal offices enforcing their own new and weird interpretation of civil rights laws is a worse plague than the simple proliferation of redundant federal offices because enforcement of civil rights laws often carries extra emotional, societal, and legal complications. This enforcement action is an example of why two former top Education Department officials, Robert Eitel and Jim Blew, argued in an April column that the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights should have its functions moved to a parallel office in the DOJ, and, more broadly, that the whole Education Department should be shut down.

Except in rare cases, deciding whether school materials are appropriate involves community standards that are local. That’s why Section 8526A of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act directly prohibits the federal government from involvement in state and local decisions about curricula. An earlier part of Section 8526 says federal funds may not be used “to promote or encourage sexual activity, whether homosexual or heterosexual” ( see page 429 here ), yet here, the Office for Civil Rights is telling schools they must carry books that promote sexual activity.

This imbroglio involves Georgia’s Forsyth County's schools removing eight books after parents complained they were inappropriate because, the superintendent later confirmed, they “were obviously sexually explicit or pornographic.” For the federal government to crack down on schools because the schools refuse to carry pornographic books is unconscionable.

So, this is not “book banning” or authoritarian. Nobody is trying to block the publication of these sexually explicit books. Nobody is trying to stop their sales. Nobody is trying to stop ordinary libraries from carrying them, although they might be labeled to give notice of their contents. Nobody is saying parents can’t buy or borrow books from libraries if they deem them appropriate for their children.

All that is involved is saying some books are, by community standards, age-inappropriate and thus should not be in grade-school classrooms or libraries even if otherwise generally available.

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This is standard stuff. If 6-year-olds aren’t allowed in R-rated movies without parental accompaniment, why should they be exposed to the printed-word equivalent — or, worse, the equivalent to X-rated videos — when separated from their parents?

This is not book-banning but an age-and-place restriction, nothing more. For the Education Department to put the weight of the government against such restrictions is outrageous, contra-legal, and perverse.