If one book is banned, is any book safe?
NEWS WRITER
The question, “If one book is banned, is any book safe?” was posed by ReLeah Cossettt Lent, author, educational consultant and chair of the National Council of Teachers of English Anti-Censorship Committee at the opening of the ACLU Banned Books Forum held April 15 at the Harvey Government Center in Key West. Anne Rice, Monroe County Library Administrator and Judy Blume, Key Wester and well- known author, also contributed their experiences with book banning.
Lent lists the reasons given for challenging or banning many books over the years. My Friend Flicka, by Mary O’Hara was banned because a female dog was called a bitch. Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax because it discriminated against the timber industry. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl because it supposedly encouraged children to disobey their parents. Where’s Waldo by illustrator Martin Handford because it contained a cartoon picture of a woman in a bikini with the top missing. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson because it’s about a penguin that has two daddies (based on a true story). The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins because of its religious viewpoint. And the list goes on.
In the mid 1980s, Lent was an English teacher and a parent complained about I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. Lent had letters go home to all her students’ parents and 98% approved of the book. The school superintendent, however, banned that book and 60 others including Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Call of the Wild by Jack London. This incident brought out “60 Minutes” and generated a Washington Post cover with flames coming from the book. Finally, the mayor stepped in and reinstated all the classics that had been banned, but it took a lawsuit before Cormier’s book could be reinstated. Do parents have the right to approve of what their kids read? “Yes, of course they do,” says Lent. “But they do not have the right to approve of what everyone else reads.”
Lent became advisor to the school newspaper and students were raising as much as $2,500 a month selling ads to local businesses. When an ad was submitted by a gay and lesbian group to promote a meeting, the principal did not permit it to be printed. His reason: “You know, if some of our kids show up for that meeting, they might turn gay.” He then removed Lent as advisor to the newspaper. Lent subsequently won a lawsuit for $120,000 that went mostly to lawyers. And the principal, William V. Husfelt III, is now superintendent in Bay County Schools in Florida.
Judy Blume said there once were signs in supermarkets declaring “how to rid your schools and libraries of Judy Blume books”. In her Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, a toddler swallows a turtle. This book was banned because “reptiles have feelings too.” Blume has written 24 books for children and young adults and three adult books that have sold over 82 million copies worldwide. A Key West and Martha’s Vineyard resident, in 1996 Blume received the American Library Association Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement and was named Distinguished Alumna by New York University where she received a Bachelors of Science in Education. In 2004 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Several years ago in a TV interview with Blume, William Buchanan had a number of Blume’s books with ostensibly offensive passages marked, some relating to masturbation. Following a sound grilling by Buchanan, Blume asked, “Mr. Buchanan, are you hung up on masturbation?” That became the headline in the following day’s Washington Post. “Masturbation,” states Blume, “is the number one no-no.” During the 1980s, Blume states, “censors crawled out of the woodwork” and book complaints quadrupled. Judith Krug, long time director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, was a strong anti-censorship activist, fought for more government transparency during the Reagan Administration and battled with the FBI over a program to monitor children’s reading.
Blume’s final advice for parents on children’s reading is, “Be honest with your kids, but don’t let them go on believing that Santa and the tooth fairy are real.”
Rice, the Monroe County Library Administrator, handles many censorship requests ranging from concerns about age appropriate reading level of a book for children to removing free press materials stacked in the library. Another complaint concerned a 1990s poster promoting Gay Health Month. A new pastor in town thought the library should not be promoting that.
Rice did once reclassify a children’s book for a young adult age level, but to her knowledge no book has been banned at the Key West Library.
The library does have a form that helps a person articulate a problem they may see. The form also asks if the person actually read the book in question. The complaint then goes to a five-member library board that hears from the person complaining and then makes a decision. According to Rice, they do occasionally give out the form for a complaint, but there have been no challenges for the past 12-15 years.
Consider Lent’s opening question: If one book is banned, is any book safe?
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One of the biggest applause lines at that meeting was in response to a wish that Civics would be taught in schools as it was when many of us were growing up. Something needs to be done to return a focus to the greater good for the community over the selfish desires of the individual. To often, we see individuals trying to impose their ideology and religious views on everyone or push to serve their own immediate financial benefit. Worse, they have perverted the meaning of our Constitution and twisted "freedom" and "liberty" to mean the complete opposite: the right to impose their religion and "values" on everyone, to censor those who disagree, to deny documented facts and to profit without considering the expense to everyone else.