Freedom of Speech Banned in the USA
It has been a bad year in the battle to fight ignorance, as the latest reports from the American Library Association and the writers’ group PEN America show. The two issued reports outlining the struggle to counter the effort by extremists to ban books.
Banned Books Week which runs from September 22–28 is an effort to draw attention to the challenges nationwide to censor what people, especially young people, can read. The organizers emphasize that the fight for the “freedom to read” is a year-round battle.
Some of the most famous authors and greatest novels have made the list including:
Agatha Christie’s “Death on the Nile” (1937), Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1943), Olive Ann Burns’ “Cold Sassy Tree”(1984), Barbara Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer” (2000) and Julie Murphy’s “Puddin’” (2018), “Go Tell It On the Mountain” by James Baldwin, Alex Haley’s “Roots: The Saga of An American Family” (1976) and W.E.B. DuBois’ “Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880” (1935), andPhilip K. Dick’s 1968 dystopian novel “Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)”.
But there are two themes that drew the most bans in the Top Ten Most Banned Books last year. Anything deemed “sexually explicit” and most particularly, books dealing with gay and lesbian issues. Seven of the top ten books were banned specifically because they had LGBTQIA+ content.
The Associated Press in its analysis of book bans over the past year called the findings “mixed”. Citing the Library Association’s numbers, the report says there was a “substantial drop” in the number of complaints about books in public, school and academic libraries. On the flip side, though, it notes that PEN America found that there was an “explosion” in the number of books being removed from school shelves.
Part of the reason for the ‘mixed’ analysis is that the library association and PEN use different measures for determining what counts as a ‘ban.’ But probably the more accurate reason is that many schools have adopted a form of self=censorship.
Author Joanna Perrillo who wrote a book on the subject notes in an article on the Slate website that many English teachers are being challenged on two fronts. First are conservative parents like the mis-named Moms for Liberty which should be re-named Moms for Suppression. They want not only their children to be ignorant but all children. Worse though are conservative school board members who pressure teachers and librarians to remove books — either through their own misguided beliefs or for fear of radicalized parents.
Two states account for the majority of book bans, according to an analysis by the group 19thnews.org which draws its name from the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote. They are Florida and Iowa, both states with a Republican trifecta, meaning the party controls the house, senate and governorship. And, of course, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has stoked the lies about books being used by Democrats to push their perverse sexual, racial and political material on our youth.”
There is a well-known phrase that “ignorance is bliss.” Actually the full quote from an 18th century poet is — “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.” It is actually believed to have derived with a quote from Ecclisiastes in the Bible: “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
Or to translate that into modern terms — it is more comfortable to not know something. And that pretty well describes the mind set of the people trying to ban books.
