BOOK BANNING

Since I live in a state which is second only to Florida in its attempts to ban books in its school and public libraries, it behooves me to at least address this issue once briefly in my blogs. I actually have mixed feelings on the subject.

On the one hand, I sympathize with those sincere parents, many of whom are devout Christians, who are rightly concerned regarding the sort of reading material that is freely available to young children, who may not be yet mature enough to process some sexual information. I know that when I was in junior high my mother was certainly concerned about the wide range of adult novels I was reading and even asked our pastor to speak to me about it. Fortunately, he was a fairly young man who didn't take much convincing to realize that my interests in those books was far from prurient. However, now I realize that such parental concerns over literary influences on their children are starting much earlier, back in elementary school.

But there is another group with whom I have a great deal of trouble sympathizing – politicians. We only have to go back to the days of Hitler and the McCarthy witch hunts during the cold war to realize that demagogues at many levels of power and influence just love to cynically latch on to the public's latest fears and capitalize on them in order to solidify their fan base in order to grab even more power.

I remember in the 1950's my cousin telling me that in her rather conservative school district, high school geography and history teachers were even forbidden to mention the country Russia or show a map that contained it. This sounds absolutely silly to us today, but just a few weeks ago there was a battle in one school over a child's cartoon book which showed in one frame the backside of a small boy jumping out of a tub. Compare that with a Walt Disney short cartoon from the 1930's which I recently saw. In the space of about 5 minutes, one of the little boys in it lost his pants three times, as pictured from the rear. I think we have reached the point of overkill in trying to shield our children.

Thus, in Texas, the battle a few years ago which tied up the legislature for a whole session was over access to school bathrooms. Now it mainly revolves around “unsuitable” books. If such a campaign were carried out in a logical and considered manner, I think it might be a productive exercise. But logic is scarcely ever much of a concern for those legislators. So, we have seen books being banned on the sole basis of whether they contain any individual word found on a long list compiled by some anonymous persons using unknown criteria. And these words, however, may have multiple meanings, some of which are perfectly innocent. But context is rarely taken into account in the decision-making process. In addition, librarians are now afraid for their jobs if they happen to make the wrong decisions as to which books to keep and which ones to discard. I know this full well since one of my sons-in-law was, until recently, a consultant for a number of libraries in the area.

Getting back to the overall subject of this blog site, one of my real concerns is the fate of the Bible in such a restrictive atmosphere, because by any criteria currently employed the Scriptures should certainly be among the first books to go. Its pages, especially the Old Testament, are chock full of four-letter words and often forbidden subjects such as actual and attempted rapes (both homosexual and heterosexual), various degrees of incest, bestiality, lesbianism, castration (voluntary and enforced), circumcision, bigamy, serial monogamy, spousal abuse, concubines, cross-dressing, dismemberment, blinding, dismemberment, birth control, premarital sex, adultery, prostitution (male and female, common and ritual), graphic descriptions of lovers' physical attributes, and child sacrifices.

In addition, there are many more things in the Bible we could add that draw the special ire of liberals and atheists. These include charges of it promoting the practices of slavery, anti-Semitism, bigotry, ethnic cleansing, and who knows what else.

The bottom line is that the reading of practically any book can be helpful or hurtful to the reader depending on a number of factors, maturity and intent being only two. As two very diverse examples, the wonderful but disturbing movie “A Clockwork Orange” contains a scene of a young incarcerated psychopath who pours over the Bible, reveling in all the examples of sex and violence he can find in its pages.

But in an opposite extreme, I have known to shock adult Sunday school classes by recommending, only partly in jest, that the best books on Christian apologetics are the pornographic writings of the Marquis de Sade. That is because he is the one historical personage that I consider to be the most consistent atheist of whom I am aware. He was a French novelist who wrote a series of very long novels in which every other chapter was usually a logical defense of atheism by its main characters with gross pornography filling the other chapters. The overall theme of each book was that since there is no God, people should be free to act any way they want as long as they have the power to do it. (This is actually a very reasonable conclusion, considering his beginning hypothesis.) The author in real life did just that, and what he wanted to do was engage in sexual orgies, incest, and torture. It is from his name that we get the term sadism, and he died in an insane asylum.

So, in conclusion, I would like to make a plea for people not to (1) overreact with fear whenever someone holds up a new boogeyman that must be immediately eradicated or (2) follow mindlessly some demagogue who is only trying to consolidate or increase his own personal power in that manner.

Please keep in mind that although today it may be books promoting alternative lifestyles, tomorrow it will be the Bible. And actually, the Bible was recently banned in a Utah school district using exactly the same criteria conservatives have employed to ban sexually explicit material.