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Don’t Kill the Ideas
We just finished Banned Books Week and so I have censorship on my mind. It’s not just me, either: next year’s Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival has taken censorship as its theme. Some gremlins just keep coming back.
Or maybe they never left.
I remember when Sarah Palin crossed my shock threshold when on three occasions she asked a librarian about willingness to remove books from the library if/when asked to do so (and, in fact, subsequently attempted to remove the librarian herself). These days, that doesn’t even rise to the level of surprise.
I worry about censorship, and not just because I write for a living. I worry about censorship because it limits and even destroys the one thing that might combat ignorance, fear, and injustice: the free flow of ideas.
And let’s not bring the children into it, okay? In discussions of censorship, there seems to always be the requisite reference to “our children,” as though all community decisions need to make life easier for parents. Let me be clear: if you do not want your child to read something, then it is your job to make sure he or she does not read it. It’s not my job, and it’s certainly not the library’s job.
A public library — which is supported by the taxpayers — has no business censoring books it will stock, and nor does anyone (politician, religious…
