If you think that reading a book will turn a kid gay, you might as well think that you were the star player on Baruch College’s championship volleyball team.

So it makes sense that our congressman, George Santos, is a co-sponsor of recently introduced book censorship legislation in the House of Representatives. Book banning is rooted in a disdain for facts, truth and reason, and who better represents that disdain than George Santos?

The congressional bill that Santos has chosen to add his name to as a co-sponsor would make it a federal crime for a publisher to furnish a school with printed or digital material “containing a sexually explicit visual depiction of any kind,” punishable by five years in prison and a $500,000 fine. It does not define “sexually explicit,” which in the iconography of the book ban movement might mean as little as the corner of a single panel in a page of panels in a graphic novel glimpsing half a topless woman (e.g., Maus, the holocaust memoir and graphic novel banned last year in a Tennessee school district).

The bill allows for an exception for “material with serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value,” at least nodding to one prong of the Supreme Court’s three-prong obscenity test. Yeah, the bill is likely unconstitutional on its face. But for its supporters, that’s besides the point.

The real point is to terrify publishers into avoiding the risk and expense of prosecution, prison and bankruptcy using tactics whose effectiveness school teachers and librarians across the country can attest to, most recently in Florida. The larger goals served by such strategies and tactics are to demonize LGBTQ individuals, families and communities; to deny, and thus dodge fixing, the racial and other inequalities that exist in our society; and to channel expression and thought into narrow lanes that comport with their ideological views.

Anti-freedom advocates have a long list of books that need banning and thinking that needs blocking. LGBTQ themed books and programming top their charts, but I’ve also seen cited “Zahra’s Paradise,” a graphic novel about political oppression in Iran, for its brief depictions of nudity and sexual content to highlight the Islamic regime’s hypocrisy, and a graphic novel version of George Orwell’s 1984 (irony is not a topic book banners like to read about either apparently), for nude silhouettes and dialogue of Winston’s and Julia’s romp in the woods.

Yes, you’ve seen this movie before in our region. As recently as 1982, the Supreme Court found that the Island Trees School District in Nassau County violated the First Amendment rights of students when it removed books from school libraries that it determined were “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semetic [sic], and just plain filthy.” The school board had declared that “[i]t is our duty, our moral obligation, to protect the children in our schools from this moral danger as surely as from physical and medical dangers.” Sound familiar?

But Great Neck is an odd place to wage war against the freedom to read, to learn, and to think. Great Neck schools are among the best in the country, let alone the state. Its library — a main branch and three satellite branches — is equally impressive. Learning is revered here, both for its own sake and for the opportunities for advancement it provides, and Great Neck’s taxpayers put their money where their mouths are.

Facts, truth and reason are clear. Books with LGBTQ themes or characters are not grooming kids to be transgender. Teaching that black lives matter isn’t teaching that white lives don’t. Suppressing conversations about sexuality won’t suppress a teen’s curiosity about sex (or, with a smartphone in their hand, their access to many worse places to learn about sexual health than through books at the library).

And you have to actually attend Baruch College before you can star on its volleyball team.

Rory Lancman

Great Neck

Lancman is president of the Great Neck Library Board of Trustees, but the opinions expressed in the letter are his own.