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Challenges to the freedom to read — or go to the movies
Libraries around the country celebrated the 26th annual Banned Books Week Sept. 29–Oct. 6, the highlight of a year that saw an unusual crop of challenges to the freedom to read — or go to the movies, for that matter. Libraries and bookstores nationwide marked BBW by erecting exhibits (many of which played on the year’s Pirate Ship theme) and staging special events. They also joined the ALA in using new technologies: Facebook, MySpace, Second Life, Teen Second Life, a Google map that showed where BBW events were happening, and even groups on Flickr to share photos.
The annual observance of BBW is sponsored by the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), the American Booksellers Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of College Stores. It is endorsed by the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book.
The debate over NSLs drags on
The civil rights and library communities — including the ALA — continued their opposition in 2007 to the use of National Security Letters (NSLs) to obtain personal records without some level of court review. Separate bills introduced in the House in July and in the Senate in September sought to restore limits to NSL powers granted to the Department of Justice under the USA PATRIOT Act and restore rights to NSL recipients, such as the right to challenge compliance. While Congress pondered how to balance protecting individuals’ privacy with the information-gathering needs of national security, the ALA asked that Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legislation specify that since libraries are not Internet service providers, they must receive a court order before sharing records about anyone’s online interactions with someone on U.S. soil; and the ALA Council, at the 2007 Annual Conference, unanimously passed and sent to all members of Congress a resolution condemning the use of NSLs to obtain library records. Debate on the legislation bogged down in Congress and continued into 2008.
Book challenges and controversies continue
In specific First Amendment cases, the Miami Dade County Public Schools continued to try to remove Vamos a Cuba, a K-3 travel-series title, and its English-language counterpart, A Visit to Cuba, from district shelves because they “are rife with factual omissions, misrepresentations, and inaccuracies” such as failing to state that Cuba is a dictatorship. In 2006, a U.S. district judge upheld the ACLU of Florida’s request for an injunction against the school board’s action, but the board appealed the case to the Federal Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. The ALA’s Freedom to Read Foundation and the ALA affiliate REFORMA, the National Association to Promote Library & Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking, were among the organizations that filed amicus briefs in the case.
Controversy surrounded Higher Power of Lucky author Susan Patron, who barely had time to savor receiving a Newbery Medal before a national debate ensued about whether her use of the word “scrotum” on page one would corrupt America’s youth. News services picked up the rumor that library media specialists had vowed to ban the book from elementary schools, but the ALA’s youth divisions quickly put the rumor to rest.
Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass caused an outcry shortly before a film version was released in the United States and elsewhere. In Canada, several Toronto area Catholic school boards removed the fantasy novel from library shelves for review. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in the United States published a 26-page pamphlet that claimed the books were “written to promote atheism and denigrate Christianity,” and Canada’s Catholic Civil Rights League and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints chimed in with similar warnings.
“Removing a book from a school or library because the author is an atheist or because a religious group disagrees with the book’s viewpoint is censorship that runs counter to our most cherished freedoms and our history as a nation that celebrates and protects religious diversity,” ALA President Roy said in a statement on the issue. The Golden Compass is on the ALA’s Top Ten Banned or Challenged Books List for 2007; the film version was also the target of protestors.
A high school English teacher in Tuscola, Texas, was charged with distributing harmful material to a minor after the student chose and read Child of God, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Cormac McCarthy, which had been approved for an Advanced Placement reading list. The student’s parents, who objected to the novel’s mature themes, including a serial killer who has sex with his victim’s bodies, filed the charges after the school administration backed the teacher. The ALA’s OIF cited this case as one in a series of recent incidents in which would-be censors use “harmful to minors” laws to intimidate teachers and librarians and chill access to literature.
In a challenge from abroad, Cambridge University Press requested that American libraries that own the 2006 book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World, by J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins, either remove it from their shelves or attach inside its front cover an errata sheet with 11 corrections. The publisher had agreed to pulp its remaining copies in response to a libel claim filed in Britain by Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi banker whom the book claims financed terrorism in Sudan and elsewhere during the 1990s. The OIF demurred. “Unless there is an order from a U.S. court, the British settlement is unenforceable in the United States, and libraries are under no legal obligation to return or destroy the book,” the OIF said.
The federal Bureau of Prisons initiated the Standardized Chapel Library Project in response to concerns that prisons might become recruiting grounds for radical religious groups. Under the initiative, the bureau ordered its chaplains to remove and dispose of any book in the chapel library that did not appear on a list of up to 150 approved texts for each of 20 categories of religious practice. Hundreds of thousands of books were removed, which in some cases meant the chapel libraries were emptied. ALA President Roy expressed outrage at the initiative in a statement in September in which she said, “A government agency should not have the right to determine what religious texts are ‘appropriate’ when our Constitution promises not only freedom of speech, but also freedom of religion.” Two prisoners filed a lawsuit challenging the policy, and the bureau backed off, saying that it would return the materials to the libraries and focus on “material that could be radicalizing or incite violence.” The review continued into 2008.
Would-be book-banner thwarted
JoAn Karkos checked out It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, by Robie H. Harris, from the public libraries in Lewiston and Auburn, Maine, in September and refused to return them because she thought the book was obscene. She also filed an obscenity complaint against Lewiston Public Library for carrying the sex-education book. Karkos did not impress the local police, who found that the book’s educational aims put it outside the reach of Lewiston’s obscenity ordinance; but she still has a chance to impress a judge: She has a trial date of May 28, 2008, on a civil charge of failing to return library property.
The right to read? Read on!
Libraries certainly support the right to read — but in whose language? The question became tangled in a larger national debate in June 2007 as Congress failed to pass the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act and Prince William and Loudoun counties in Virginia took steps to limit undocumented immigrants’ access to public services. Resolutions they passed in July affect library circulation policies, although agencies in both counties — not just libraries, but schools, parks, hospitals, housing, sheriffs’ offices, and employment agencies — scrambled to find out whether the new directives conflicted with federal and state laws and regulations.
The debate continues over the effect of linguistic diversity on American identity, with library associations such as the ALA and REFORMA enthusiastically supporting the right to read in one’s own language.
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