Banning Books NOOOOOO!!!!

 

Peyton Place was my first banned book...banned by my mother. I was 15. I read it cover to cover, snuck from the bookcase and was overwhelming disappointed. What was the fuss about?

Although my senior year of high school, we read the anti-Semitic Merchant of Venice, we were forbidden to read Othello. Only one person in my class ended up with a biracial marriage.

At university a Catholic schooled girl told the professor that her religion wouldn't allow her to read some of the books on the required course. He said, fine, she could either withdraw or flunk. She must have read them because she graduated.

I never banned anything for my daughter. From seventh grade her school gave kids a list of 100 books in June. They were expected to read 10 over the summer. A majority of the books on that list have turned up on various banned lists in southern schools. She wished the Old Man and the Sea, which she thought horribly boring, was banned from her required reading list.

The new wave of book bannings is at best terrifying. Many of the books are classics and/or well loved that add to the child's knowledge. It is enforcing ignorance.

At the moment, the banning list contains more fiction. Next will there be non-fiction? Many text books are now eliminating events that put the U.S. in a bad light. One text I saw had drawings of happy slaves but no hanging blacks. 

Groups like Mothers for Liberty is a fast-growing group with one of those Orwellian titles that is the opposite of what it does. Each of those women should have the right to protect their child from knowledge, but they have no right to make that determination of other people's children. 

Nor does any governmental body have the right to ban information from its citizens. Granted there is misinformation that people are exposed to, but if a citizen is only exposed to one side of the story from childhood on, they will lack the tools to find the truth.