“I find it profoundly disturbing that we’re accepting so easily the idea that books should be banned and burned and taken away,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. The virulence of the opposition in Spotsylvania County especially alarmed her.

“I thought we rejected that authoritarian impulse, you know, decades ago,” she said.

Others feel triumphant. Daniel Latham, a father who spoke at the Monday meeting in Spotsylvania, said he and a group of like-minded parents were inspired to review the school system’s library after reading news stories about parents challenging texts elsewhere in the country…

“I believe that should be the parent’s choice, to expose their children to graphic sexual content,” the 40-year-old said. “If it’s in the [school] library, I lose that choice.”

Objections to books are nothing new, but they seem to have intensified over the past year, according to advocates of free access — with isolated complaints giving way to more concerted efforts that quickly spread to other areas, often propelled by social media. Caldwell-Stone from ALA traced an apparent rise in challenges to political outrage over topics such as LGBTQ sexuality and “critical race theory” — a college-level academic framework that examines systemic racism in America but has become a catchall for conservative concerns about the way schools discuss race.