Attempts to censor and ban books are not a new phenomenon. In 1650, Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to get what they thought were blasphemous books removed from their community. But what sets this latest wave of book banning apart is how much of it is being driven by politicians. PEN America found that more than 40 percent of the bans were "tied to directives from state officials or elected lawmakers to investigate or remove books in schools." The Post's Annie Gowen chronicled how a Texas county judge personally walked into a local library and took books off the shelves, ignoring the library's procedures in which a person is supposed to fill out a challenge form to be reviewed by librarians.

Purging libraries of books without a proper process and input from librarians, teachers and a range of community members is wrong. These latest book bans are not about protecting youths. Librarians and concerned citizens are right to fight them.

It's not indoctrination, it's the simple recognition of the reality children see with their own eyes and through their own life experiences and those relayed to them by their peers.

And in one of the most telling and identifiable differences between the left and the right, people of good conscious aren't demanding their majority rights to bully for their own way. All they're saying is that the public is better served through a processing and assessment of complaints where all stakeholders can weigh in, not just those trying to force their own way upon everyone else. You know, that pesky democratic process instead of forcing others to relent to the authoritarian demands which ignores the countervailing wants and needs of those who disagree.

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It's also projection, which in reality is truly the right's superpower. While I'll never say that sexual deviancy falls strictly along political/ideological lines, there is zero doubt whatsoever that the Republican Party tends to allow more deviant people safe haven within their party until their abhorrent private conduct bursts out into the public's consciousness. Publicly they project themselves as strong but aggrieved social warriors for Xtian morality, while in private many act as if anything goes - and these same people are protected from within until they're not, when they become an embarrassment to the party.

Many people have posted lengthy lists comprised of a sickeningly high number of Republican elected officials or party apparatchiks being caught up in criminally deviant sexual behavior or situations with underage youths, yet when a photo of Al Franken playfully miming a sexually suggestive grope arose, the Democrats mostly united and forced him to resign.

One party is not like the other and it's been that way for decades regarding sensibilities. In Republican eyes, the greatest sin of Democrats is that they'll stand up for the marginalized and want to invest tax money and shape policy to help average Americans, even those normally unrepresented in the power circles of government and commerce.