Book banning is having a moment, and unbelievably, it is not even the '90s! This is the most retrograde trend since mom jeans came back. Or maybe scrunchies.

And yet, here we are. School leaders, egged on by parents and political groups, are pulling library books that deal with race, LGBTQ issues, social movements, gender, sex and the violent history of the world. It's happening from Texas to Oklahoma to Florida.

A school board in Tennessee recently banned "Maus," a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust. Lessons on the horrors of genocide were fine, apparently, but the eight bad words and a nude cartoon mouse were a bridge too far.

Parents in one Florida district have started reading passages of books they deem objectionable at school board meetings, excerpts that are surely inflammatory without context. Last week, another district took 16 books off the shelves for review, from Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" to Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner." Two bills that would give parents more control in the book review process are moving through the Florida Legislature.

Folks leading the charge always say it's not about censorship, and, uh, sure, Jan! The ordeal suggests that school libraries are brimming with porn (heads-up: that's on the little handheld computers in kids' pockets). In reality, media specialists work hard to review literature and place it according to demographics and maturity levels. Some schools already give parents electronic control over what their children can check out.

The moral panic is very "Fahrenheit 451," a cautionary tale that ends in total wartime chaos with intellectuals hiding in the woods. That tracks. Instead of having parent- and educator-led conversations with nuance, get into the brush behind a Dairy Queen to figure out hard stuff like normal!

But for the sake of argument, let's assume this new wave achieves its desired effect. It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever grown-ups get draconian, the youth fall in line without question.

For instance, when adults are all, "Whatever you do, don't dare open the armoire with the magical MacGuffin or a great misery will befall you," and then the adults leave, the children will not, under any circumstances, open the armoire. These are just the facts of science.

Similarly, when Stacy's parents said, "Robert is not welcome under this roof," Stacy absolutely did not date Robert for the next 14 months. She was definitely spending the night at Alicia's because of all the big tests. There were a suspicious number of exams that year.

"Enough with your hypotheticals," some may scream, gripping the school board-approved "18 Exciting Uses for Buttons." "What about the real world?"

Great point. We can all agree that as soon as parents started decrying violent video games, teens switched to Xbox battles about chaste side-hugging. "Grand Theft Auto" was replaced by "Adventures in Pleasantries."

Obscenity warriors have tried to mute rap and rock music for decades, with acts from 2 Live Crew to N.W.A. to even the Beatles falling victim. Those artists enjoyed no increased record sales, no certified gold club bangers, no major Hollywood biopics.

Absolutely zero attention came to the banned book "Where's Waldo?" — sit with that briefly — when a sliver of side boob was discovered in a beach scene. That scandal tanked "Where's Waldo?", thank the maker.

And no one has ever heard the term "Streisand effect," coined when Barbra Streisand tried to hide photos of her house and made everyone look instead. Certainly not "Maus" author Art Spiegelman, who did not reference such effect when sales of "Maus" skyrocketed more than 700% as news of the ban spread. The attempt to scrub the materials in no way opened the story to a new generation of readers who can now process the atrocities of the Holocaust and generational trauma in a profoundly accessible way.

Oh, wait. That's exactly what happened.

Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on Twitter or @stephrhayes on Instagram.

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