WARNING: the following is a rant, and I am none too polite about wanna-be-censors.
I’m a librarian and a writer by profession, so the words "book burning" give me icy chills. I immediately flash on pre-World War II Germany, with Hitler’s Nazis gleefully setting fire to "undesirable" books. I also recall a fundamentalist preacher in the U.S. burning Harry Potter books (can’t give a citation, but I recall the news story) . Censorship in general squicks me, but burning books is just counter to everything my first-amendment-loving heart believes in—the only book I’ve ever consigned to flames was a free review copy of Gor author John Norman’s Imaginative Sex which we used as kindling to start a barbecue grill, because my husband had gotten tired of me whinging about the lack of punctuation throughout.
Well, it looks like the censors are cranking it up again, this time in a small city in Wisconsin. This time the object of their loathing isn’t J. K. Rowling’s series about the boy wizard, but Young Adult novels dealing positively with homosexuality. The problems began when a local couple, Jim and Ginny Maziarka, demanded that any sexually explicit (the meaning of which had yet to be defined) from the Young Adult (YA) to the adult section—and be specifically labeled for their contents. They objected to any sexual content—but they particularly focused on books which treated gay sex in a positive light. They also wanted anti-gay books added to the collection, particularly some by "ex-gays" because ""All the books in the young-adult zone that deal with homosexuality are gay-affirming. That's not balance."
Things escalated from there.
The library did not agree with the Maziarkas' suggestions, and the couple appealed to the library board. Ginny Maziarka, a mother of four, began blogging about the issue and the local newspaper picked up the dispute, sparking the opposition.
Maria Hanrahan, also a West Bend mom, set up a rival blog to argue the other side.
"I'm against any other party telling me what's appropriate for my child and what isn't," said Hanrahan, 40, who also created a West Bend Parents for Free Speech group. "We don't mean to say these are appropriate for everyone, but we don't feel they should be set apart from other materials or restricted from the young-adult section."...
Because the board didn’t immediately rush uinto action, the city council voted not to renew four board members. That didn’t satisfy the Maziarkas. They then wanted 82 titles—more than double their original list— moved, and have since increased it, according to the petition they circulated,to include all "youth-targeted pornographic books" which according to their definitoion was any book which describes graphic sexual acts.
The book they focused on most is called The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It’s the story pf a boy’s freshman year in high school and it includes a rape, and both heterosexual and homsexual sex acts. The ary director defended it, saying that the book showed the consequences of indiscriminate behavior rather than glorifying them. For this reason, on June 2, the board of directors for the West Bend Community Library, including the four outgoing members, voted unanimously not to move any of the books. Ihaven’t read the book, but I do know, as a librarian, that libraries have strict policies about book selection, especially for children and YA books, and this book wouldn’t have been chosen if it hadn’t gotten favorable reviews in Library Journal and other trade publications (School library Journal, Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, etc.).
And here’s where things get truly mad. Robert Braun, 74 (along with three other men who describe themselves as "elderly"), has filed a claim against the library stating that their mental and emotional well-being was damaged by a book in the collection because it was "explicitly vulgar, racial and anti-Christian." They demanded that the book be publicly burned and that they be awarded $30,000 apiece in financial damages. Nope, not "Wallflower" but a different novel about a gay teen entitled Baby Be-bop. Braun says he is president of a Milwaukee group called Christian Civil Liberties Union, and says the book contains offensive language (the "n word" and some sexual epithets) and graphic sex acts. He also called for the West BendAttorney to call a grand juryt to decide whether the book was obscene and tomake distirubting it a hate crime. The American Library Association, which backs West Ben’s library, says it will help the library defend itself against the claim but doubts that it will go forward because ithas little basis in law. I suspect the ALA also believes that no judge in his right mind would call for a public book burning.
My question is, what were a bunch of old geezers doing prpowling around in the YA section in the first place? If they ‘re Republicans, I gotta wonder if they’re of the Mark Foley persuasion and were crusing for pickups.
There are times when I think our country has gone a little nuts, then there are times when I know it has. I thought our local loony, Laura Mallory, wasinsane with her lawsuit against Harry Potter, but it appears that the fundamentalists in out nation are having collective shit fits about anything and everything—and especially the first amendment when it protects the rights of non-fundamentalists to read and speak as they choose.
What ever happened to the notion that parents are responsible for monitoring what their kids read? These are the same people who scream that parents have the right to control pretty much everything their children do, from whether they study the facts about evolution to what sort of sex education a school system offers—yet they are strangely unwilling to actually do precisely that when they have the chance. And they have plenty of opportunity to do so, right in their own homes. They can check what their kids are reading, use parental controls on their cable TV, and censor the movieskids watch and rent. But, no, having the means to take control isn’t enough. Because actually using those controls requires WORK. They have to actually monitor their kid’ reading and viewing habits and set the controls. No, instead, they want to make sure that everyone bows to their notions of morality and that anything which offends them be banned, and, preferably, burned. Not content with controlling their own kids, they want to control the rest of us.
And I, for one, am damned sick and tired of it. I live in a small town in GA. Every time I go into the local library, I am confronted by multiple copies of Ann Coulter’s vomitus—but so far I have managed not to rip any of them to shreds, or even to file a complaint demanding they be removed for factual inaccuracies that fill a number of websites of fact-checkers with far stronger stomachs then I possess. I stride pass shelves of books penned by right-wing preachers, while noting there is one accurate book on my own faith, Wiccan, flanked by two inaccurate tomes condemning my fellow co-religionists as baby-killing Satanists. I can even manage not to mutter too loudly when I notice that the "Inspirational" section (translation: "Christian" novels which means insanely right-wing fundamentalist Christianity, not any other kinder gentler version of Christianity) is larger than either the science fiction or romance sections. If I—and I am a natural redhead with an Irish temper as well as a devout liberal feminist civil libertarian Wiccan--can manage to control my natural urges to scream loudly about balanced collections when I spot the very unbalanced one in my library, then I should think they can manage to permit a few books they don’t like to sit on the shelves. No one will force them to read them, and, if they’re fulfilling their God-given duty to be holier-than-thou self-righteous asshole funsamentalist parents, their children will be prevented from reading them by them.
More to the point, I want books featuring gay teens on the shelves. The suicide rate among gay teens, let alone depression, is considerably higher than among straight teens. Anything which prevents one kid from committing suicide is a good thing, in my book. I could go along with non-fiction books by ex-gays in the sexuality section, and even a novel or two on that theme, in the name of a balanced collection (non-factual though the "ex-gay" crap is)—but the idea of pulling books because they deal honestly and positively with gay teens makes me want to trhow up.
And here’s the final clincher on the Maziarkas’ desire to have all the YA books which offend them moved to the adult section and labeled for their sexual content: in the end, it wouldn’t prevent teens from having access to them, because once you have an adult card, teens can check out adult books. Their whining served no purpose other than to get a small city all riled up, turn neighbor against neighbor, and make them feel like Good Christians because they stood up to Teh Evillllll Gay. I guess, in the world of Right-Wing Craziness, that’s enough. Even though they’ve lost their fight once, they’re going at it again because of the four new board members they hope will go along with their insane (and pointless) plan.
"We want parents to decide whether they want their children to have access to these books ... and we want the library's help in identifying [them through labeling and moving]," Maziarka said. "It's just common sense."
No, Mr. and Mrs. Maziarka, common sense is actually taking the time to pay attention to your kids, and taking some responsibility for them. But that takes work. You know, if you’d devoted the time you spent blogging this, filing complaints and pushing petitions, actually with your kids, you might not have to worry about their reading books you deem inappropriate or offensive because you’d be the ones taking them to the library and keeping track of what they’re reading.. But that wouldn’t be as much fun as infringing on the first amendment rights of others, would it?
And Mr. Braun, if a book offends you, I have a simple solution that doesn’t involve a lawsuit: don’t read it. If you start a book and find it not to your taste, return it to the library without finishing it. I do it all the time; in fact, I did it with Ann Coulter. Of course, without a lawsuit you’re 99% certain of losing, you won’t be able to complain to everyone about how liberals hate Christians and Teh Gays want to seduce young people and make them Teh Gay too. Frankly, I don’t know which infuriates me most: censorship of libraries or the whining of right-wingers when they lose. Just because you don’t get to decide for everyone else what they can read, doesn’t mean we hate Christians. It just means we love the first amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and expression to everyone.