Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
In an effort to fight what they call “censorship,” the American Library Association (ALA) is once again sponsoring a Banned Books Week for school students during which time children will be provided with books that have been banned from library shelves because of inappropriate content.
“Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment,” writes the ALA on their website. “Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.”
The ALA, whose bill of rights for libraries does not believe in restricting anyone’s right to read whatever they please in a library because of their age, has been sponsoring this project since 1982. During this week, children will be able to read books from the ALA’s most frequently banned books from the last decade.
Many of these selections include books promote that “alternative lifestyles” such as Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite about a young boy whose divorced father sets up housekeeping with his homosexual partner, and Heather Has Two Mommies which tells the story of a girl conceived through artificial insemination who is being raised by two women.
Then there are books such as Forever by Judy Blume which explicitly details the sex between two teens as well as promotes use of the pill. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris contains such explicit sexual content that one mother made headlines in 2007 for refusing to return it to the school library because of its pornographic illustrations.
Occult-themed fiction such as Harry Potter, the Goosebumps series and the notorious Church-bashing series His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman will also be readily available.
“The books featured during Banned Books Week have been targets of attempted bannings,” the ALA writes. “Fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections. Imagine how many more books might be challenged—and possibly banned or restricted—if librarians, teachers, and booksellers across the country did not use Banned Books Week each year to teach the importance of our First Amendment rights and the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society.”
Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court does not consider the distribution of prurient material to minors to be a First Amendment right. “The interest in protecting young library users from material inappropriate for minors is legitimate, and even compelling, as all Members of the Court appear to agree,” said the U.S. Supreme Court in US v. ALA in 2003. In this case, the ALA was fighting implementation of the Children’s Internet Protection Act in 2003 which would protect children from pornography by installing filters in all public libraries.
But that hasn’t stopped the ALA from fighting to inappropriate reading material into the hands of children. Their leaders have been known to be vocal proponents of what many would call downright vile reading material. For instance, Judith Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association in Chicago once defended a book promoting bestiality by accusing its critics of being racist because the author is black.
Aside from promoting banned books, the ALA’s Banned Books Week is also promoting a false idea of censorship to the public.
As Jonah Goldberg writes in USA Today, “Banned Books Week is an exercise in propaganda. For starters, as a legal matter no book in America is banned, period, full stop (not counting, I suppose, some hard-core illegal child porn or some such out there). Any citizen can go to a bookstore or Amazon.com and buy any book legally in print — or out of print for that matter.”
When the American Library Association talks about censorship of books, it’s actually referring to “banned” or “challenged” books, he explains. A “banned” book is a book that has been removed from a public or school library shelf due to pressure from someone who isn’t a librarian or teacher.
“Meanwhile, a ‘challenge’ happens when someone — usually a parent — questions the suitability of a book. If you complain that your 8-year-old kid shouldn’t be reading a book with lots of sex, violence or profanity until he or she is a little older, you’re not a good parent; you’re a would-be book-banner.”
Since the earliest days of mankind, people have sought to protect the public from prurient material. This is what’s known as “moral censorship” and it includes the suppressing of materials such as child pornography.
There’s also political censorship which is when governments hold back information from their citizens in order to exert control over the people and prevent any kind of free expression that might cause a revolution.
Religious censorship is when a dominant religion in a country forces limitations on minority religions.
Corporate censorship is where the public should direct its energy in any war against censorship. This is when corporate news organizations and editors deliberately suppress or prevent the publication of material that runs contrary to their views, often portraying opposing viewpoints in a negative fashion while promoting their own ideologies.
The kind of censorship the ALA is fighting is nothing more than a “straw man” and an over-hyped one as it is.
As Goldberg points out, the ALA presents their case as if censorship is at crisis proportions, which it is in not. There is only a small number of challenged books every year.
“These days, teachers unions are fond of claiming that apathetic parents deserve more of the blame for the woeful state of education today. Maybe so. But a national policy of bullying parents interested in what their kids are reading hardly seems like the best way to encourage them. Indeed, from these numbers, the real scandal might be that so few books are ‘banned or challenged.'”
Over the past ten years, American libraries were faced with 4,660 challenges.
• 1,536 challenges due to “sexually explicit” material;
• 1,231 challenges due to “offensive language”;
• 977 challenges due to material deemed “unsuited to age group”;
• 553 challenges due to “violence”
• 370 challenges due to “homosexuality”; and
Further, 121 materials were challenged because they were “anti-family,” and an additional 304 were challenged because of their “religious viewpoints.”
Click here for a list of the ALA’s most challenged books in the past decade.
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