Banned books - another question

[Caius Marcius]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "davewitley" 
<dfrankiswork at n...> wrote:
> I share most people's bemusement at the titles that have been 
> challenged (Tom Sawyer?  What could be more all-American than 
> that?).  I also support the arguments that have been put forward 
> about children and their parents normally being the arbiters, 
rather 
> than others.
> 
> However, I'm a little puzzled (perhaps because, as an un-American, 
I 
> get by without a constitution and we don't seem to have 
> this 'challenging' phenomenon here in the UK) as to what the aim of 
> the ALA is on this issue.
> 
> As I understand it, it is not the government, or some official 
body, 
> that tries to get books removed from library shelves - this is 
> ordinary citizens making a challenge to their (local?) libraries.
> 
> So what does ALA want?  To take away the right to challenge the 
> material on library shelves?  Or just to educate the population so 
> that they use that right in a different way?  What is the purpose 
of 
> the right existing at all?  If (as someone suggested) having a 
> book 'banned' (from libraries, of course, not shops or homes) is a 
> breach of constitutional rights, how can the right to challenge be 
> contitutional?
>

The GOP has come under fire in recent weeks for distributing campaign 
literature in West Virginia stating that if the Democrats win the 
election, than the Bible will be "banned."

http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_09_21.shtml

>From the context of the article, I don't know whether the article was 
claiming that the Bible would be "banned" in the Stalinist sense that 
having a Bible in one's possession would subject one to criminal 
prosecution and penalties, or merely that Bibles were banned from the 
public school ciriculumn. I suspect the author was trying to play 
upon the credulity of his more trusting readers, and blur the 
distincton between the two.

But isn't that the case with most of the "HP is a banned book" crowd. 
Now surely, JKR's books are the 800-lb gorilla of modern literature - 
they're so popular and so widely available in so many languages that 
it's difficult to imagine that anyone wanting to read them will be 
unable to obtain access to them (so, you're 10 years old, Mom won't 
let you buy one, and the school library doesn't carry it - so, slip 
out to the local Wal-Mart, plunk down 6.95 for a copy of Sorcerer's 
STone, and hide it under your pillow).

Does the fact that Bible-study is prohibited in virtually all public 
schools these days outrage on the same scale that some schools are 
not stocking the five HP novels? Of course not - but how much sense 
does that make?  If one doesn't know JKR, one is missing a ripping 
great story - but if one is missing Scripture - and I'm keeping this 
on a purely secular plane - there are gigantic chunks of Western 
culture which cannot be understood at all without some knowlege of 
Scripture - even the militant athiest Nietzsche wrote that "compared 
to the Bible, everything else is merely literature." With all due 
respect to the authors of To Kill A Mockingbird and The Color Purple, 
I would suggest that a individual unfamiliar with those novels who 
was yet in possession of a working knowledge of the Gospels and the 
book of Genesis would be somewhat better equipped to understand what 
she was viewing when visiting her local Museum of Art.

I remember reading the astonished reaction of a Civil War scholar who 
suddenly realized that his students had no idea what the newly-
liberated black citizens of Richmond Virginia meant (on April 11, 
1865) when they hailed the visiting President of the United States 
as "Father Abraham" (wow - antebellum black slaves better educated 
than late 20th Century white college kids - whatta concept!)

Similarly, there are writers throughout the world whose works are 
being "banned" in the old-fashioned sense that "the writer will go to 
jail, & the readers will have the book confiscated, for starters." It 
would be nice if the ALA would focus a little attention on guys like 
Russian author Vladimir Sorokin and his 1999 novel Blue Fat. 

http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/07/25/russian.author/

http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5508

   - CMC