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“We are not trying to remove classics of literature,” . “What we are trying to remove is graphic images that young children should not be having a look at.” Accordingly, her government is now revising the ministerial order to focus on what the premier calls “pornographic images.”

You may think this is a step in the right direction. Yet by exempting “classics” from its censorship campaign, the Alberta government has only made clearer what many long suspected: that marginalized voices are the true objects of its attack.

Indeed, Smith doubled down on the government’s desire to ban the four graphic novels it had initially cited as problematic: Blankets, by Craig Thompson; Fun ɫɫ��, by Alison Bechdel; Flamer, by Mike Curato; and Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe. Smith refers to these books’ sexual imagery (some of which is now displayed on a government website, divorced from all context) in support of what she presents as a commonsense position: “Young children,” she argues, should not be exposed to “pornography.” What parent would disagree?

Let’s think about how Smith makes her argument: she claims “young children,” particularly, shouldn’t have access to these books, although nobody is suggesting they should (even on his own website, Curato recommends Flamer for readers 14 and up). Yet the Alberta mandate would ban them from schools provincewide, including high schools, meaning 17- and 18-year-olds would also be denied access. By using the spectre of “young children” consuming “pornography” as a scare tactic, Smith obscures important developmental differences between age groups.

She also deploys a word intended to induce a jump-scare in parents’ hearts: “pornography.” The premier would have us believe that the works she’s identified are “pornographic,” something that’s again taken to be self-evident: Smith’s government has selected out-of-context images from the books in question to support her claim.

Of course, most of us understand that movies can contain nudity or sex without constituting “pornography.” You can imagine how someone could deliberately misrepresent Titanic, for example, by creating a reel consisting only of sex and nudity found in the movie. Pornography is notoriously hard to identify, but legal definitions have long insisted that what matters is the overall intention of the work or the effect it produces, not the mere presence of sex in isolated scenes, sentences, or paragraphs.

Let’s be clear: under the guise of banning pornography, Smith is targeting serious and ambitious works of literary and graphic art. She wants deprive Alberta high-school students access to “one of the best graphic novels of all time,” as the Guardian has called Blankets. She believes that Flamer — “an essential book that shows readers that they are never alone in their struggles,” according to the School Library Review — ought to be purged. With this gambit, Smith has desperately underestimated the degree to which Albertans value their freedom, including their children’s freedom to read.

Exempting “classics,” then, is no solution, especially given there’s no consensus as to which texts should fall into that category (and besides, many so-called classics contain sexually explicit content anyway). Smith uses the term merely to sharpen what she sees as the distinction between “proper” and “pornographic” literature. Yet while the premier claims her government’s book ban has nothing to do with gender or sexual orientation, — while only a few could be called classics.

Despite appearing to have changed course, Smith is only paying lip service to literary tradition while continuing to focus on the censorship of marginalized voices, which her government appears to believe are contrary to Alberta’s socially conservative values. But imposing partisan values on the public via censorship is not the government’s job.

While politicians often attempt to justify book bans by appealing to “parental rights,” these campaigns are an attack not only on the rights of parents but also on children’s rights and the freedom to read. Across Canada, we must stand against governments who would reduce our children to mere pawns in the never-ending culture wars.

Every parent cares about the media their kids consume, and educators and librarians have a responsibility to make thoughtful decisions about how to curate school libraries with age-appropriate content for all students. But those decisions must remain in the hands of educators and librarians, not partisan politicians who wouldn’t hesitate to liquidate library shelves of books they perceived as ideologically hostile.

It’s great that Alberta is no longer interested in banning “classics.” It’d be better still if the government abandoned book bans altogether.