Let’s Celebrate Banned Books Week! (or not . . .)

Last updated on: October 1, 2013 at 9:20 am by Jane the Actuary

Let’s Celebrate Banned Books Week! (or not . . .) 2013-10-01T09:20:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Actually, Banned Books Week seems to have run its course. This is the first year that my Facebook friends haven’t been posting about how many so-called Banned Books they’ve read and sharing the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week website, and I don’t recall any special displays at the library last week either. Good riddance.

And, no, I’m not a troglodyte. But I think most of the so-called “book banners” have legitmate concerns. More and more “young adult” literature includes sex, or so I’ve been told, anyway, both in terms of “modern classics” (e.g., Toni Morrison and Alice Walker), and not-so-classic books introduced into the curriculum in an effort to be “relevant” to students. In some cases, it is entirely appropriate for parents to ask the school to step back and reconsider the reading they’re assigning, or at least offer alternate assignments.

The BBW promoters cast this in terms of ignorant parents opposing Huck Finn or Harry Potter due to religious backwardness. But many of the titles on their “top ten” list are identified as sexually explicit, including 50 Shades of Grey (though they don’t identify the context for these challenges, perhaps wanting the reader to think the worst, or just due to the additional time it would take to put this online).

Consider that libraries, who would never offer a porn collection in their DVD section or Playboy in the magazines, often make the news for men viewing porn in the public computers and for an official stance that there’s nothing wrong with this. This complete failure in judgement, this insistence on not making any kind of judgement, in my view, discredits their anti-censorship stance.

(If you were expecting a discussion of the Shutdown, you’ve come to the wrong place. Except I will say that what’s most disturbing is that it’s all a game of political calculus that the media encourages in their articles on “who will win?”)

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