While driving home after a companionable breakfast with my son, I was listening to NPR’s Ozarks at Large. That’s where I first heard about an Arkansas bill seeking to hold librarians criminally liable for children’s access to materials that might possibly be perceived as prurient.
It’s perfectly acceptable for parents to censor their own offspring’s reading and viewing choices, but expecting librarians to do that job for them is ridiculous. Are librarians meant to read all the books in their respective libraries to ensure there is no potentially prurient content? Bill SB81 suggests our elected Arkansas officials have zero faith in the abilities of their constituents to monitor their offspring’s choices in literature, so they are putting the onus on libraries.
But let’s pretend, for a moment, that the Arkansas librarians are going to review all the books on their shelves for possibly offensive material. Will we lose Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn because Huck, a boy, dresses up as a girl? William Golding’s Lord of the Flies because it contains nudity? Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird for content on sexual assault? Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter for its adultery? These are all books frequently studied in American schools.
For that matter, the Bible contains rape and incest. (And I’m aware of at least one university professor who, while teaching “The Bible as Literature,” referred to the Song of Solomon as “the greatest erotic poem ever written.”)
After the legislature is done with libraries, will they move on to bookstores? Faulkner’s As I lay Dying, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Orwell’s Animal Farm, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—all banned at Barnes and Noble?
Then on to the theater! Opera in the Ozarks—XXX for adults only. The slapstick shenanigans in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” includes cross-dressing. Other operas are equally questionable. And no Shakespeare at Walton Arts Center—Prurience abounds!
Then there is the problem of Amazon, and Netflix, and, well, the internet in general. There is just no end to that tunnel of smut.
Holy cow, y’all! Wouldn’t it be easier just to teach our youth to think for themselves?
An entry on encyclopedia.com entitled “Censorship In Children’s Literature” had this to say: “Bad language, inclusion of bodily functions, poor morality, and insolence towards adults are all frequently identified as reasons for censoring or altering offending children’s works, and the list of potential crimes grows every year, a fact that Judy Blume (best-selling author of children’s books and young adult novels) laments: ‘There is no predicting the censor. No telling what will be seen as controversial tomorrow.’ The end result, she worries, is ‘the loss to young people. If no one speaks out for them, if they don’t speak out for themselves, all they’ll get for their reading will be the most bland books available. And instead of finding the information they need at the library, instead of finding the novels that illuminate life, they will find only those materials to which nobody could possibly object.’”
That would be a sad day, indeed.
Footnote: All the novels mentioned herein have previously been banned somewhere at some point in time. Support your public librarians, folks. Tell your legislators to have more faith in the parental abilities of their constituents to monitor their own children’s literary habits. Turning civil servants into public censors is a bad idea.
For more information, check out the American Library Association website: ALA.org. Visit their Fight Censorship page. Quick! Before it’s censored.