"Ban" (or "deny children access to literature") seems a pretty extreme term for something that appears to be more accurately described as "exclude from the curriculum" — or, at most, "remove from the school library."
And we may agree or disagree with the arguments for and against specific books, but school reading lists have always been shaped by moral, political and didactic agendas and views about what is appropriate for children of a particular age. A hundred years ago there's no way they would give schoolchildren a book to read with the word "fuck" in it (of course, a hundred years ago it was almost impossible to have such a book printed in the first place), and it's similarly reasonable to decide today, for example, that we won't use any book with the N-word in class. Because we are influenced by what we read, children in particular.
That said, I do think schools should teach texts that reflect worldviews that differ from mainstream modern thought, both because you otherwise throw out a lot of great and culturally significant literature, and because it is important to show that people did think differently in the past, including that some prejudices were commonly accepted. And I definitely don't think you should exclude works that are in themselves unobjectionable simply because the author may have written or said other things we would find offensive. (So, for example, even if you decide against teaching The Merchant of Venice, that doesn't mean Shakespeare should be excluded from the curriculum altogether; nor should you throw out all books by Roald Dahl.)
Also, while I don't trust the WSJ to provide an unbiased summary of events, I definitely have misgivings about "cancel culture" when it goes after people who aren't "in the game" (pundits, political activists, etc.) with full force, including online harassment and threats to their careers, to punish stray comments.
