THE MEANING OF CENSORSHIP DISTORTED
I PRAY that everyone reading this will take a closer look at the American Library Association by reading this well-written and researched essay…
“THE SEDUCTION OF THE AMERICAN PUBLIC LIBRARY” by Helen Chaffee Biehle here:
eagleforum.org/educate/1996/feb96/focus.html
EXCERPT:
The library with which most Americans over the age of 30 grew up was the creation of people like William Fletcher, who, writing at the turn of the century, encouraged librarians to accept responsibility for the library’s moral influence in the community. This is the heart of the change: today the ALA resoundingly rejects this responsibility as naive and old-fashioned. Its official statements ridicule and ostracize librarians who do not comply with this rejection of responsibility to the community, and library schools teach this new doctrine. The acceptance of moral responsibility for children in the library is now called “unprofessional,” making a responsible moral judgment about materials purchased for the library is called “elitist,” and the librarian who is brave enough to do either is labeled a “censor.”
Look at the philosophic change: for its entire history, until the 1960s, the philosophy that undergirded the American public library was the same as that which informed the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, and made the free speech clause possible. James Madison’s thinking sprang from the English Enlightenment, with its emphasis on human reason. However, the dignity of the individual and the attribution to him/her of rights was based on a theistic idea which Madison took for granted: that persons were created by God, who was the Source of human rights. Madison said in another context, “We have staked the whole of our political institutions on the capacity of mankind to govern themselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”
Until the 1960s, the American library shared common values with its public, and compared with today’s library, was a communitarianinstitution. (Communitarianism accepts the idea that individual freedoms must stop short of harm to others and that the good of the community is of great importance.) Libraries, before the 1960s, had great local autonomy. Librarians were free to make moral judgments and were thus free to acquire the best available materials for their library collections. There were separate collections for children and adults.
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Now, what about the bugaboo of censorship? Way back in 1948, the ALA added the following Article to the Library Bill of Rights: “Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.”
Unfortunately, for the last 25 years, the tail has wagged the dog. Since 1967, the Office of Intellectual Freedom has made CENSORSHIP its most important issue, and has broadened the definition of censorship far beyond its original meaning of prior restraint. “There is no good censorship,” says one of the Statements of Interpretation, those ALA proclamations that tell librarians how they should think.
The ALA fears censorship with an almost paranoid obsession. …stoke the fires of this paranoia in the Intellectual Freedom Manual with their list of potential censors, which includes not only everyone in the community but everyone in the library, as well. Nobody escapes.
The list includes: “Parents, either singly or in groups…Religious groups…Protected minority groups…Patriotic groups” and, for good measure, “emotionally unstable individuals.” The enemies list includes library trustees, in whom governing power over a library resides. Why are trustees, library management, and even staff, under suspicion? Here is Ms. Bolt and Mr. Conable’s answer: Because they may be “parents, church-goers and members of political organizations.”! In other words, these people might commit the heresy of not following the ALA party line. No independent thinkers allowed here!
The placing of church-goers under suspicion is especially ironic. During the first quarter of this century, John Cotton Dana, sometime president of the ALA and one of its best-known names in the history of the public library, cultivated a warm relationship with churches, for they were an enormous help to him in establishing libraries across America.
And what about parents? Responsible parents have invested enormous amounts of time and treasure in their children, and they need help from the community in raising them to be responsible adults. I’m sure you’ve heard the old African proverb: “It takes a whole village to raise one child.” Our parents could once count on the library to be part of our village.
How sad that we can do that no more! In fact, Peggy Noonan has pointed out that contemporary American parents are forced to spend inordinate amounts of time protecting their children from our culture.
END OF EXCERPT
Good-night.
Dolores49
