Book ‘burners’ still plaguing America

“Censorship under the guise of child protection has been an excuse for not educating children--about media, critical thinking and moral values.”
--Marjorie Heins of the Brennan Center for Justice

Book banning never ceases in America, supposedly the land of the free.
The Dade County School Board voted recently to remove from its libraries a series of children’s books, including one depicting smiling Cuban youngsters wearing uniforms of the communist youth organization.
The book, “Vamos a Cuba” (“Let’s Go to Cuba), was deemed “inappropriate.” Other books removed included several that had been praised by reviewers.
The American Civil Liberties Union, perhaps the finest organization in America, filed suit in federal district court to halt the removals. It cited student right of access to books.
Remember the 1969 Tinker case? Kids in Des Moines, Iowa, protested the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands to class. Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas wrote of this symbolic speech:
“It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional right to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” He quoted from the court’s rejection in 1943 of a West Virginia compulsory flag-salute statute:
“That they are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of constitutional freedoms…if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.”
Justice Robert Jackson, writing for the court in the flag-statute case, said: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.”
Remember the 1982 Pico case? A school district in Long Island, N.Y., removed nine books from a high school library because of complaints by conservative parents. One of the books was “Slaughterhouse-Five,” a modern American classic by Kurt Vonnegut.
Lower federal courts upheld this strangulation of young minds. But not the Supreme Court. Writing for the court, Justice William Brennan had it right: “Our Constitution does not permit the official suppression of ideas.”
None of those decisions matter in this so-called free country. Too many Yahoos rule.
Linda Ellerbee, former NBC correspondent and anchorwoman, wrote a moving column about her son who seldom read more than comic books. But one day in school he was assigned a book report.
“The story dealt with a friendship between two migrant farm workers in California during the Great Depression, how they had a dream and what went wrong with their dream and why some people’s dreams couldn’t come true and how terrible a thing that was,” Ellerbee wrote.
“He told me about George describing to Lennie the farm they would own one day, asking Lennie to see it with his heart, knowing the whole time what had to happen next…and suddenly there were tears rolling down my son’s cheeks. He could not go on. But he knew. The kid got it.
“Today my son is a writer. More than that, my son is a reader, a lover of words, of ideas and it began with that one bannable book, John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men.’ ” (“Of Mice and Men” was among the 10 books most frequently attacked in high school and public libraries in the 1990s. The novella was labeled blasphemous, offensive and racist.)
The New Yorker carried a memorable essay about metaphorical book burning in “The Talk of the Town” (March 22, 1982). The writer visited a library in “a small, neat city” in “another part of the country.”
He was both astounded and chagrined to discover that the local library had banned Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms,” Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” and “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
The librarian explained that those books were banned “to protect the children.” The stunned author wrote:
“Well, I have spent a fair amount of time protecting children from things--mostly fundamental things like cold, hunger, automobiles, broken class--so I understand the impulse. But I cannot understand protecting children from intelligence, protecting children from passion, protecting children from complexity and protecting children from…the end of ‘Huckleberry Finn’:
“ ‘I reckon I got to light out for the Territory…because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it.’ ”
If his 15-year-old daughter “is not permitted to read ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ she is not free,” the author concluded. Or, as John Stuart Mill put it in his 1859 essay “On Liberty”: “Silencing opinion is robbing the human race.”