For movies about ghosts playing baseball, Field of Dreams can be very real. In a scene midway through, main character Ray Kinsella and his wife Annie (played by Kevin Costner and Amy Madigan, respectively) attend his PTA meeting in a small town in Iowa. Concerned citizens are trying to remove Terrence Mann’s (his J.D. Salinger stand-in, played by James Earl Jones) book.
In real life in 2022, parents and activists across the United States are raising the book issue. This is a formal request to the library to remove or relocate the book. Several Texas school districts have removed books on racism and LGBTQ issues from their shelves.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law restricting books used in schools and creating a process to challenge parents, citing themes of gender identity and sexual orientation. The Republican-controlled Tennessee legislature passed a bill creating a state commission that could ban books from schools.
Removal requests don’t always come from conservatives. In 2019, his two Democrats in New Jersey introduced a resolution to remove Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from school curricula, citing racist language.
We had challenges in our own state as well. In June, Colchester’s first elect, Republican Andreas Bisbicos, presumably at the request of a parent, released a children’s article about celebrity RuPaul from the children’s section of the public library, without filing a formal objection. He claimed that it was because one of the pictures in the book was sexually inappropriate and that it wasn’t about RuPaul.
He also asked for reviews of all the books in the children’s section. There were no reports of someone like Annie Kinsella calling anyone a “Nazi cow,” whose removal was on the agenda of the town meeting, but seemed active. He opposed Bisbicos, who later withdrew his request.
Regardless of political affiliation, most Americans are uncomfortable with censorship. According to his March poll by the American Library Association, 75% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans “oppose efforts to remove books from libraries.”
Forty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment limits how boards of education can remove books from school libraries. Justice William Brennan, representing the majority in Island Trees School District v. Pico, wrote that the Constitution “does not permit the formal suppression of thought.” “More importantly, the right to receive ideas is a necessary precondition for the meaningful exercise of their rights of speech, press and political freedom by the recipient.”
The reason given for removing most books, especially those on sexual or social subjects, is to protect children. In an age where all kinds of materials and images can be found on any number of electronic devices, that seems unlikely. But what they are likely to do is teach their children undemocratic lessons. If you don’t like something, or don’t want to see or hear anything, you can block it. You can prevent others from exercising your freedom or thinking for yourself.
College campuses have long been battlegrounds for free speech. Some have recently been accused of providing “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” and speakers being yelled at by protesters and counter-protesters. “I don’t agree that when you become a college student, you have to be pampered and protected in many ways,” President Obama said at Iowa City Hall in 2015.
It takes a thick skin to participate in the marketplace of ideas that is a democratic society. It is an aversion to freedom to get rid of books because you are afraid of what they say or what people read and learn and think.
Chris DeMatteo is a Fairfield attorney.
Comments
Post a Comment