Last week, Art Spiegelman — author of Maus , a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust — warned the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that he saw "a real warning sign of a country that’s yearning for a return of totalitarianism." His book was being "banned" again, this time in a Missouri school district. For his part, Sargent declared that "what’s galling is the casual unconcern among many book purgers that the frenzy they unleashed might be sweeping just a tad too broadly."

Sober citizens need not be concerned about "book purgers," nor about incipient totalitarianism. Because Maus wasn’t banned. And based on the available evidence, it never has been.

To be sure, those who listen to most of the media with casual credulity might think that it has.

Last year, one Tennessee school district decided to swap Maus out as assigned reading for another book about the Holocaust. But tens of thousands of curricular inclusion/exclusion decisions are made each year.

Never before has a single such decision garnered headlines from the New York Times, PBS, NPR, Rolling Stone, CNBC, the Guardian, CNN, the Atlantic, USA Today, etc. The reason why the media put the story on blast is obvious: there is a broader partisan conflict over so-called "book banning," a term that the median American associates with the rise of the Nazi Party.

For liberal partisans, the idea that parts of the American right are banning books about the rise of the Nazi Party is too juicy not to pump into the public discourse.

It might actually be politically troubling if that curricular decision were made as part of a rollback of Holocaust education. But it wasn’t. The board decided to use a book with more words and fewer pictures to teach the same moral and political lessons.

And it might have actually been politically troubling if that decision were a harbinger of a broader censorship movement that took aim at teaching about historical atrocities. But it wasn’t. According to PEN America, Maus had since been "banned" in four school districts. Given that there are about 14,000 school districts in America, reasonable minds may disagree about whether actions taken by four amount to anything worthy of national note. But any reasonable mind inclined to concern should be put at ease by the fact that the evidence suggests that Maus wasn’t actually banned in any of those districts.

After all, PEN America defines the word "ban" far more broadly than conventional English usage.

If a book is, say, moved from a school library to a school counselor’s office, it has been "banned." And if it is temporarily removed from the shelves, reviewed, and then returned for all students to access, then — according to PEN America — it has been "banned." That’s what appears to have happened in the school districts PEN America flagged as "banning" Maus. Local press accounts suggest that Maus was returned to the shelves in Indian River County, Florida, and publicly available library card catalogs show it is still on the shelves in Katy, Texas, Wentzville, Missouri, and Ritenour, Missouri.

In the latest incident to make national news, school staff in Nixa, Missouri, flagged the book as possibly violative of a new state law against obscenity. Then the school board took a look at it and decided it was fine. It’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that school staff exhibited bone-headed professional judgment and wasted their school board’s time. But there is no sane political basis for concluding that this incident evinces a deep yearning for totalitarianism. Or that a so-called "book purging" frenzy has gotten out of hand.

An overwhelming majority of parental book challenges are based on objections to sexually explicit material. Conservative parents see a graphic illustration of a sex act being performed on a sex toy, or a detailed depiction of underage incest, and believe that the content is not appropriate for a school library. Liberal activists and media then label them "book banners" and hunt for any excuse to suggest that their (common sense and likely close-to-universally-held) moral beliefs reek of totalitarianism.

The real problem here is not that parents are objecting to sexually explicit library materials, or that in that alarm a wider net is sometimes cast and other works are occasionally reviewed by school boards. It’s that the media has jiu-jitsued this normal and healthy parental and political reaction into yet another reason to spread causeless animosity for partisan profit.