It was the 70s and I was 8-years-old when I heard a reporter on the 5:30 p.m. “Nightly News” say a book was banned from some school library because it called Jesus “a man with no connections.”
Boy, I was positive they did the right thing. That was a lot for my virginal, Sunday school trained ears to take. I was shocked that anyone would write such a terrible thing.
It was near the end of the week before I even learned it was Banned Books Week. I listen to NPR, my primary news source, every day and I was bound to find out there sometime. Or was that on fakebook? Maybe now I’ll store it in my long-term memory – last week of September.
As a teenager and twenty-something college student, I was always filled with intrigue, walking by a shelf at the front of Walden Books or B. Dalton and seeing the toy chains and prison imagery surrounding titles like: Native Son, Slaughterhouse Five, The Grapes of Wrath, The Sun Also Rises, Go Ask Alice, Brave New World, The Color Purple…Books have been banned because they contain horrific words like “whore,” “bastard” and “sonovabitch.” Fahrenheit 451, a short novel attacking book burning, was banned for using the word, “God damn.”
I once interviewed a guy who challenged his high school library because it contained no books by Kurt Vonnegut, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Vonnegut is always a target for book banning. It’s all that sex and profanity in his works. Plus, he was a goddamn atheist. Some might say the ideas of peace and tolerance in his works comes closer Christ’s sermon on the mount than what you’ll find in a gay bashing evangelist’s right-wing rant, but shouldn’t people be left to judge?
So they want to ban Vonnegut from school libraries? What are they afraid of, that kids might actually hate war and cruelty? They want to save our white “real American” youth from subversive ideas like that.
Just like back in the 1950s when a Montgomery, Ala. Public library banned the children’s book, The Rabbits Wedding by Garth Williams. This book was highly offensive to prevalent, moral standards in the community, what with that picture of a white and black rabbit holding hands on the cover. Some communist plot to indoctrinate our children into accepting interracial marriage.
Today, they’re trying to push the “homosexual agenda” on our kids. Who wants their child bringing home a book about two male penguins holding hands and raising a baby? (And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell)No, you won’t see teachers in small-town Kansas classrooms educating students who have two moms or two dads.
Oh no, the teachers will never deal with the grade school boy getting his ass kicked every day on the playground because he might like boys and prefers playing house with the girls to kickball with the tough guys. A book like King and King (Linda De Haan and Stern Nijland)about two princes who fall in love – we don’t want this book to actually help this kid feel secure in his morally deficient identity.
Nor, do we want 12-year-old girls reading about (gasp) menstruation – in a Judy Blume book. Or a 15-year-old girl with body image and burgeoning sexual issues (surely teenagers don’t have those) reading Carolyn Mackler’s The Earth, My Butt and Other Round Things.
Then there’s the plethora of books in the
YA (Young Adult) genre, which groups are banning or trying to ban because they take on stuff like drug abuse, racism, rape, dating violence, sexual abuse…Perhaps, the writer has an audience in mind. Maybe, there is a demographic that can relate to those books. If that’s the world teens are living in then, seems to me that should be the focus.
This world isn’t the well-defined place I thought it to be when I was 8-years-old and my grandparents took me to church every Sunday. It’s a complicated place, filled with people who bring to life a far different frame of reference than what I had known from my experience.
There are people who don’t accept Jesus, are gay or lesbian, communist, take drugs and were born in countries where they view my native land – a place I was taught to believe was like God’s country on earth – is the great satan. I’ve come across such views in books and will continue to do so. Maybe, I’ll like that book and maybe I won’t. Regardless, I feel that book should see the sunshine of day so others can make up their own minds.
We have a thing in this country called the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, press, religion and all that good stuff. A book by John Steinbeck might be condemned for being “anti-American,” but America is all about the free expression of ideas, anti-American and otherwise.
Sooner or later, I was going to grow up and see the world wasn't a neat, tidy place. Reading and examining life from the perspectives of others has been a pretty good deal for me.
