Sep 30th, 2009
Posted by Stephen Narain, First Amendment Working Group at 4:55pm	Free Speech

Finishing Beloved

We’re in the midst of Banned Books Week, a national celebration of the right to read. Created in 1982, Banned Books Week aims to raise awareness about challenges to the inclusion of books in libraries, bookstores, and school curricula across the country.

The ACLU, from its landmark 1933 defense of James Joyce’s Ulysses, has long been involved in the fight against the censorship of books. Unfortunately, challenges to free expression are hardly a problem of the past.

In 2008, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom reported that there were 513 challenges to books. School districts, in particular, continue to restrict students’ access to books based on content and viewpoint—usually because of perceived profanity or offensive depictions of race, gender, and, often, even national identity. In 2006, for example, the Miami-Dade County School Board voted to pull copies of Alta Schreier’s Vamos a Cuba because of parents’ complaints about the author’s representation of life in that country. This year, in North Stafford, Virginia, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was challenged as “un-American, leftist propaganda.” Recently, students in an Advanced Placement English class at Eastern High School in Louisville, Kentucky were instructed by their teacher not to read the last 30 pages of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

What do students lose out on by not reading those final pages?

This week provides an opportunity for us to reflect on that question, as well as on the importance of safeguarding the right to free expression. While it is important that authors write freely, it is just as important that readers read freely.

For more information on how you can get involved in Banned Books Week and for a listing of events in your area, visit: http://www.bannedbooksweek.org.

Permalink |	Free Speech

1. Dee Miller Says:
   Oct 1st, 2009 at 12:46am

   I think you can't argue with parents. If they don't want their child to read certain books, that's their prerogative. But, then they should be responsible to find a book their child may read that helps the teacher gets the point of that lesson across. My personal feelings when my daughter was in school were that she could read anything she wanted and especially what the teachers wanted her to read and the rule was, she needed to discuss the books with me and share with me what the teacher was saying about the book. I had no fear about what she might learn - I wanted her to learn everything. If there was something she didn't understand about what she was reading, we had wonderful discussions about it and I made it my responsibility to make sure she did not get the wrong idea about something because she was "too young too understand." I helped her to understand at the level appropriate to her age. She turned out okay even though she read lots of things I had never heard of until she brought them home from school. She would read me to sleep when she was little!

2. Randall McGrew Says:
   Oct 1st, 2009 at 4:00pm

   Bravo, Dee Miller! I wish more parents followed your example. By denying a child the right to read anything and everything, you are not protecting him/her but exactly the opposite. Denying education is the worst possible abuse of our children today. Ignorance, and learned ignorance especially, serves only to aggrandize the parent and places the child in the terrible position of being unprepared for the future. Banning books is one of the most odious things people can do. If there is anything that is unAmerican, that is it. People always talk about the horrors of socialism and communism while practicing the same offenses. Only in a free and open society can we dispel ignorance and raise our children to face the future. To deny them this, is to hold them captive to outmoded thinking and irrationalism.

3. Joe Morelli Says:
   Oct 3rd, 2009 at 4:40am

   hmmmm you'll tell me what books my kids can read in school, but they can't say 'under God' or pray in school, Thats their freedom of expression. You're a bunch of two-faced retards who don't know weather to shit and go blind or fart and just smell funny.

4. Sally Says:
   Oct 5th, 2009 at 9:18am

   The ACLU is not for free speach unless it suits their agenda. They are trying to take God out of anything anyone says or does. How can anyone stand up or with them. It is like doing work for the devil

5. roald Says:
   Nov 16th, 2009 at 1:58pm

   Joe, You appear to have a comprehension problem. No one is telling a child that s/he cannot say under God or pray in school. Long-standing interpretation of our Constitution by our courts says that the State cannot coerce people into praying.

   To solve your dilemma, smell funny. The other alternative will make it more difficult for you to read and learn.