It’s not censorship, it’s parenting!

During the last
week of September every year, the American Library
Association holds what it calls “Banned Book Week.” The
purpose of this week, the ALA says, is to highlight “…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.”



It sounds like a noble endeavour, right? In this day and age
I think it would be hard to find people who would actively
support the notion of outright censorship. Yet we know that
at other times and in different kinds of regimes around the
world this dedication to free speech has not always been the
rule. Keeping the principle of free speech safe requires
vigilance; if people in America really were seeking to ban
books–to forbid their printing or sale, for instance–it
would be important to focus on their efforts and to raise
awareness about them.



But that kind of “banning” isn’t what the ALA is talking
about at all.



In fact,

according to their website, the ALA’s Banned Book Week
is really called “Banned and Challenged Book Week. A
“challenge” to a book occurs when someone objects to some of
the content of a book, and, most of the time, asks that the
book be removed from children’s access. Parents were
responsible for 57% of such challenges between 1990 and
2008, and an astonishing 70% of the challenges involved
books that were either in a school classroom or a school
library. Moreover, nearly a third of challenges made to all
books (including books aimed at adults) were made because
the challengers found the materials to be too sexually
explicit.



Now, if the vast majority of challenges to books involve
parents, centre around books available in schools, and deal
with such issues as sexual explicitness, offensive language,
or the unsuitability of the books for a specific age group,
then I think we’re no longer talking about book-banning or
censorship. I think we’re talking about parenting.



The attitude of the ALA is that a parent only has the right
to censor or control what his own children read. He doesn’t
have the right to request the removal from the school
library or classroom shelf those books which he finds
obscene or dangerous to morality, because someone else might
prefer for his children to read those books. The school
alone has the final say in what books are appropriate for
the children under its care to read, and if a child reads at
school a book or books which his parents absolutely forbid
at home–well, then, perhaps the parents’ values are too
narrow and restrictive to begin with.



Here’s the dilemma for parents, though–there was a time
when we could trust schools and libraries to support, for
the most part, the same values we ourselves held, and to
abide by community standards of morality and decency. There
was a time when it would have been just as unthinkable to
the librarian or the school teacher as to a parent that a
book for children would have contained the following things:

• –Graphic language
  about sex, drinking, drugs; laced with profanity and
  written in “chat speak” (TTYL by Lauren Myracle)
• –Violence, implied
  sex, anti-religious and anti-Christian messages
  throughout; God is literally killed (His Dark Materials,
  Philip Pullman)
• –Prostitution,
  witchcraft, voodoo, devil worship (Bless Me, Ultima by
  Rudolfo Anaya)
• –Homosexuality,
  drugs, suicide, sex, nudity (The Perks of Being a
  Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky)
• –Sex, drugs,
  alcohol, eating disorders, profanity, smoking (Gossip
  Girl series by Cecily von Ziegesar)

These are some
of the objectionable content found in just five of the

ten most frequently challenged books for 2008. Given
that most challengers are parents and most challenges
involve books in school libraries or school classrooms, I’d
be much more worried about society if books like these were
never questioned at all.



Many of the challenges to these books are due to their
presence on middle school bookshelves (or even in class
assignments); middle school students can be as young as
eleven years old. And yet the ALA views parental challenges
to these books as being somehow akin to book-burnings and
government censorship, as if there were no legitimate reason
why a group of parents might not want their children reading
novels in which gratuitous and explicit sex, violence, drug
use, and the like were major elements of the story.



The fact is, there are plenty of good reasons to object to
books with these content elements in them, especially when
such young children are the ones who have access to these
books. Even if the works rose to great literary heights
parents would not be out of line to ask that they be moved
from the middle school library; but most of these books are
not, frankly, works of much merit at all. They are the
fiction equivalent of mindless TV programs, complete with
pandering, fantasy, commercialised writing, and shock value
in place of decent storytelling, a well-developed plot,
interesting and three-dimensional characters, and some idea
of consequences for actions.



To put it bluntly, the ALA puts itself in the position of
defending lousy, substandard, second-rate writing that would
probably not even be published in the first place, were it
not for the insatiable appetite for inappropriate content
usually euphemised as “dark”or “edgy” by the sort of
pre-teen who thinks angsty, brooding, sparkly vampires are a
good idea. And they cast parents in the role of villains, as
if their well-founded concerns about the content and merit
of these books were on a par with Nazi book-burning efforts.



It is clear that in many instances the library and the
school, as political entities, no longer share the cultural
values of the vast majority of parents. We are living
through a time of cultural divide — and whether you think
it’s a good or a terrible idea for novels aimed at
eleven-year-olds to contain sex and violence — is largely
going to depend which side of that divide you and your
family is on.



Because we no longer live in a world where it would be
unthinkable for an authority figure to give a child a book
in which depictions of sex, violence, drug use, profanity
and the like are major elements, it is no longer safe to
delegate the choice of reading material for our children to
such entities as the school teacher or school librarian.

Because we no
longer live in a time where giving a child a book like that
would be considered either child sexual abuse or
contributing to the delinquency of a minor, but instead is
supported with smiling approval by the moral midgets at the
ALA,

parents have to be more vigilant than ever. Because we
no longer live in an era where we can trust the authority
figures in our children’s lives to share our values and
foster the same view of morality and decency which we
ourselves have, we can’t afford to let our children read
whatever trashy novel they pick up at school.



It isn’t censorship, to teach our children that they can’t
trust their teachers or librarians to give them good,
wholesome books. It’s just the fallout from our fractured
culture, which insists on calling evil, good–and then
handing it to children.

---

Copyright © Erin Manning.
Published by
MercatorNet.com.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/its_not_censorship_its_parenting

Erin Manning is writer living in Fort
Worth, Texas.

Posted with permission.

---

Home –

Articles