On October 29th, Arapahoe Community College held an event in honor of all banned books everywhere in the most relevant place, the library. This particular event had three speakers, Jamie LaRue, an executive director of Garfield County Libraries, Dennis Quinn, director of Bemis Public Library, and Miranda Doran-Myers, tech services librarian at the Colorado Services Library. This event was more focused on censorship and the history of banning books.
The first main topic was about the historical, international, and national context for book bans: “The American Library Association was founded in 1876. At the time of founding, their motto was ‘The best reading, for the largest number, at the least cost’; however, that changed in 1938 in Des Moines, Iowa when people were trying to get two books turned over, Mein Kampf, a foreign book, and Grapes of Wrath, a story on communism,” said Jamie LaRue.
“First is personal prejudice. You walk into a library, you see a book about something that you don’t like, and it gets you,” LaRue continued during a segment about community book bans. “I’ll call this parental panic. It’s the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood and parents just freak out. I want my baby back, I want to preserve their innocence. I found this when I was at the office for intellectual freedom.”
“But what we’re seeing now is this kind of very organized small group of people who just keep saying the same thing over and over so often you think, well, it must be a majority of them. One of the things I was feeling, I always want to say about this banned book stuff is that there are certain challenges that need to be articulated. You need to treat people with dignity, but we also need to recognize that it’s still very much a minority opinion that’s trying to become a majority through intimidation,” LaRue concluded.
Another heavy discussion point was censorship and how the government censors certain information. “They are taking away grants to tell stories that we haven’t heard yet. And now, hopefully they end up getting funded at some point where people get to tell their stories anyway,” said Miranda Doran-Myers.
One topic of high importance was regarding our First Amendment Rights and books: “We’ve had a recent court case from the 5th circuit, as of this year, who apparently is no longer accepting the argument that the First Amendment applies to things that are on the shelf. They’re trying to make the case that something made on the shelf constitutes as government speech,” said Dennis Quinn.
There are a lot of questions to be asked regarding censorship and banning. In some cases, book bans may be seen as necessary, but for some other books that are meant to be purely fun reads, banning it seems arbitrary, or even like a punishment for readers.
What are your feelings about book bans?
