🌱 A Tale of Attempted Censorship in Three Acts

Push them a little further and they’ll invoke “family values”, a phrase that more and more frequently makes me feel like falling to the floor and projectile vomiting. Censorship and the suppression of reading materials is rarely about family values and almost always about control. Who is snapping the whip, who is saying “no”, and who is saying “go”. Censorship’s bottom line is this: if the novel Christine offends me, I don’t want to just make sure it’s kept from my kid, I want to make sure it’s kept from your kid as well. And all the kids.

This bit of intellectual arrogance — undemocratic and as old as time — is best expressed this way: If it’s bad for me and my family, it’s bad for everyone’s family. Yet when books are run out of school classrooms and even out of school libraries as a result of this idea, I’m never much disturbed. Not as a citizen, not as a writer, not even as a schoolteacher, which I was trained to be and used to do. What I tell the kids is don’t get mad, get even. Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead run — don’t walk — to the nearest non-school library or to the local bookstore, and get whatever it was they banned. Read what they’re trying to keep out of your eyes. Read what they’re trying to keep out of your brain. Because that’s exactly what you need to know.