“Your position is that under the Constitution, the advertising for this book or the sale for the book itself could be prohibited?” – Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy
“If the book contained the functional equivalent of express advocacy.” – Deputy Solicitor General Malcom Stewart, attorney for the FEC
– Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010)
American libraries stand on the First Amendment, taking as a bedrock principle that citizens’ right to read whatever they want must not be abridged. The desire to censor or control what other people have access to is insidious; and can be found in people of every creed and ideology. To draw attention to this risk, for forty years the American Library Association has popularized Banned Books Week, highlighting the books most frequently challenged in library collections nationwide (public, K-12, and university) over the course of the last year.
Book challenging and banning in the United States is typically local opposition (usually on moral or aesthetic grounds) to a local public or school library making some book available. Frequently, these challenges revolve around appropriateness of the book for children. All of the top 10 titles (actually top 13, as there was a tie for 5th and 10th place) challenged last year were targeted in part for sexually explicit content. Many also include LGBTQS+ content. These challenges are not new; almost all of these books have been on the list before, including Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto by George M. Johnson, and This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson.
These challenges can constitute a demand to transfer a book from a children’s section to an adult section. Sometimes it can be a demand to remove it from the library altogether; abridging the opportunity for others to read it. All told, American libraries faced a staggering 1,269 challenges to books in 2022; the highest number of challenges ALA has ever recorded and almost doubling the number of challenges in 2021.
This type of library-by-library challenge is extremely serious, but not ‘banning’ in the broad, whole-society sense as was argued for (and rejected) in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (quoted above), which would see all access to a book being prohibited. But in today’s climate, this type of comprehensive censorious impulse is on the rise. From death threats or attacks against authors to publishers altering e-books to muzzle their own writers to governments passing laws to criminalize school library book selection – including in Indiana, in the form of House Bill 1447 – real efforts have been made by powerful actors to prevent whole classes of books from being available in any capacity at all. In light of that, any challenge, even local ones, need to be taken very seriously.
In Indiana, citizens can act by contacting their congressional representatives with their concerns. These are Senator Jeff Raatz, 1-800-382-9467, and Representative Brad Barrett, 1-800-382-9841, if you live in Richmond (Sen. Raatz is a sponsor for HB 1447, and its author is Representative Donna Schaibley, 1-800-382-9841).
Indiana has been a battleground over censorship for a long time, both as a place where challenges happen and as a source of ideas and writings under contention. Many Indiana authors have been the subject of book bans or challenges, including Kurt Vonnegut, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Theodore Dreiser, and Barbara Shoup. The country is a better place for still having access to their work.
IU East also offers access to books with more information about challenging the freedom to read, including Defending Frequently Challenged Young Adult Books: A Handbook for Librarians and Educators by Pat Scales, Silenced in the Library: Banned Books in America by Zeke Jarvis, and Beyond Banned Books: Defending Intellectual Freedom Throughout Your Library by Kristin Pekoll.
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