Adam Thierer

Liberals Abandoning the First Amendment, Part 4: Banning Books in Virginia

When I open the Washington Post in the morning and find a headline like, “Banned Books, Chapter 2,” I assume that I will be reading about yet another attempt by certain conservative or religious groups to ban books from local libraries that they find objectionable, unethical, or sacrilegious. How ironic then that the debate over banning books that is currently unfolding in my home county of Fairfax County, Virginia, is being led by liberals. My ongoing series about “Liberals Abandoning the First Amendment” has been focusing on Lefties getting weak-kneed about free speech principles that they have traditionally supported, but this one takes the cake.

Here’s what is going on here in Fairfax according to Michael Alison Chandler of the Post:

During a week that librarians nationwide are highlighting banned books, conservative Christian students and parents showcased their own collection outside a Fairfax County high school yesterday — a collection they say was banned by the librarians themselves.

More than 40 students, many wearing black T-shirts stamped with the words “Closing Books Shuts Out Ideas,” said they tried to donate more than 100 books about homosexuality to more than a dozen high school libraries in the past year. The initiative, organized by Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family, was intended to add a conservative Christian perspective to shelves that the students said are stocked with “pro-gay” books.

Most of the books were turned down after school librarians said they did not meet school system standards. Titles include “Marriage on Trial: The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting” and “Someone I Love Is Gay,” which argues that homosexuality is not “a hopeless condition.” “We put ourselves out there . . . and got rejected,” said Elizabeth Bognanno, 17, a senior at West Springfield High School, standing before a semicircle of television cameras outside her school. “Censoring books is not a good thing. . . . We believe our personal rights have been violated.”


Now let me be perfectly clear about something. I find the themes of some of these books as distasteful and intolerant as many on the Left do. But I also find Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” distasteful and intolerant and yet I would never call for it to be banned from a library. In fact, I absolutely want it there. I want to make sure that people see what such hatred and intolerance can lead to. And I want people to aggressively respond to it and express their opposition to such thinking.  But they can only do that if they can read it for themselves.

It troubles me greatly that liberals — the supposed defenders of First Amendment and those typically most opposed to the idea of banning books — would fall into this trap based largely on the fact that they find the books in question to be distasteful or offensive.  As is always the case, the solution to bad speech is more speech, not censorship.

By the way, here is the website for the National Banned Books Week effort.  Do yourself a favor and read one of them.

October 3, 2008 | Comments |

Viewing 10 Comments

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    The Focus on the Family folks have a well-publicized history of trying to censor otheers -- particularly homosexuals. To members of this Colorado Springs group, people and books that are not conservative and not anti-gay are bad. Now they are using the very laws they've state that they abhor to guarantee their rights of protest. Their "loving" Christian values usually focus on hate.

    My favorite censorship quote comes from Tommy Smothers, who said:
    "The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen."
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    I don't think a library--especially a school library--has an obligation, moral or otherwise to stock every book that is donated to them. Furthermore, I think it is perfectly reasonable to make content based decisions about what you should and shouldn't stock.

    I think that if the American National Socialists Party made a donation of 100 Nazi themed books to a high school library, there is nothing wrong with that library choosing not to stock those books. Similarly, if Larry Flynt donated a complete library of Hustler Magazines.

    This is not banning books. No one here is preventing the kids from READING the books in question. The library, a HIGH SCHOOL library, no less is making content based decisions about which books should occupy its shelf space.

    Makes perfect sense to me.
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    You know, it's easy to pull out the straw man arguments. It enables you to distract from the issue. To me, there is a barometer of whether or not these books should be in a public libary.

    I’m usually not one for censorship but I am for standards. And I have a hard time believing that anything put out about the lgbt community by the anti-gay industry or their allies belong in a public library without extreme scrutiny on its credibility.

    The anti-gay industry has a track record of relying bad research (Paul Cameron) or distorting legitimate research (i.e. Elizabeth Saewyc, Robert Spitzer, Patrick Letellier, Robert Garafalo, Carol Gilligan, Lisa Waldner, Joanne Hall, Francis Collins, etc. )

    And this track record of lies should not be ignored simply because the anti-gay industry was able to find enough guillible students and their parents to try and play a game of semantics.

    I don’t think a book should be included in a library’s selection simply because a group holds a press conference and sidesteps the issues of accuracy by appealing to emotions and religious beliefs

    When choosing books, libraries should always adhere to high standards and the highest of all of these are veracity, or truth.
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    Adam:

    Obviously you have been unable to find any real examples of liberals censoring anything, so you have tries to paint the refusal of a library to accept donations that are obviously little more than propaganda as some form of censorship.

    This is one of the most inane arguments you've ever made.

    Libraries obviously have to have a donation policy, and to expect them to accept any donation, whatever its quality doesn't make sense.

    IF you want to make a case that there is some form of censorship you will have to dig a little deeper, and actually provide some EVIDENCE!
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    This has absolutely NOTHING to do with censorship, and everything to do with quality and standards.

    As noted above, if the Nazi party donated 10000 copies of political pamphlets, a library would have every right to reject them.

    Obviously, Adam has been totally unable to find an actual example of liberals censoring anything, so he has to try to present a library having a donation policy (which all libraries have to have) as an example of censorship.

    Adam: if you want to present an example of some so-called liberals censoring something please provide some EVIDENCE!
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    Hmmm...Can't find any rel examples of liberals censoring anything, so the attempt here is to try to paint a libraries donation policy, which would preclude them from accepting donations of political tracts (from either the right OR the left) as censorship???

    Seems farfetched, and very very stretched.

    Good work liberals everywhere--you are giving Adam nothing to use as an example of censorship, so he has had to dig this deep!
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    The books were not banned. They were donated to the library and the librarians did not immediately place the books on the shelves. That seems fair doesn't it? If not, then the Fairfax Family Forum has successfully redefined the word "banned". If this action is book banning, then anybody can walk into the library with an arm full of books and demand that they be shelved. If the librarian says "that's not the way things work", the "oppressed" book peddler can claim that "her personal rights have been violated".

    The Fairfax Family Forum - the group that staged this political stunt - linked to our blog twice. See our response at:

    http://www.equalityloudoun.org/?p=763
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    Let me add to the chorus in saying that this is the allocation of resources, not censorship. The typical school library is painfully limited, and a hundred new books on the shelves means a hundred old books tossed out (and time spent by the librarian doing all the processing). When resources are so limited, there's no censorship in setting standards and limits---you could say that it's resource constraints that are doing the censoring here. Are the standards biased and aimed at an agenda? That's always possible, but the Coalition, the Post, and this writeup fail to show much of any evidence that this is the case.
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    Adam, shoddy work there. You should be ashamed of not sharing the story in full, which includes the following explanation of the Fairfax County policy on book collection:

    "Fairfax County's policy on library book selection says "the collection should support the diverse interests, needs and viewpoints of the school community." But library officials said donated and purchased books alike are evaluated by the same standards, including two positive reviews from professionally recognized journals.

    "None of the donated titles met that standard, said Susan Thornily, coordinator of library information services for Fairfax schools. Some librarians also said that the nonfiction books were heavy on scripture but light on research, or that the books would make gay students "feel inferior," she said.

    "Thornily said school librarians have rejected other books that "target minority groups" and would offend African Americans or other nonwhite students. In this case, librarians were concerned about the level of scholarship in the books, many of which come from small church publishers.

    "It all goes back to the books and the publishers and the presentation and the research," she said. "

    This being the case, this is a great PR stunt, but all those folks have to do is get those books positively reviewed by two professional journals that cover that subject matter.

    Why should the rules be changed for this group? This is a rule that applies to ALL books bought by or donated to the county.

    This is a non-issue.
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    The Focus on the Family folks from Colorado Springs have a well-publicized history of trying to censor others -- particularly homosexuals. To them, people and books that are not conservative and not anti-gay are bad. Now they are using the very laws which they'ved stated they abhor to guarantee their rights o f protest. Their "loving" Christian values usually focus on hate.

    My favorite quote on censorship comes from Tommy Smothers, who said:
    "The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen."

    Sharon McEachern
    www.ethicsoup.com

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