Hidden Cost of Banning Books

I was listening to Toni Morrison talk about Intellectual Freedom and her book at this podcast with Liane Hanson on NPR, intending to blog that alone when I stumbled upon this story. I found it through a comment posted on NPR's soapbox blog about Morrison's interview.

Now that I've been reading the story from Wisconsin, I have to think that some of you have seen it already and I apologize for not keeping up. For those of you, like me, who are just learning, I hope you are equally as troubled and challenged by the ideas here as me.

It seems that four library board members in West Bend, WI were dismissed for refusing to pull YA books from their shelves. The charges are accompanied with allegations that the board is trying to further a gay liberal agenda (“the overt indoctrination of the gay agenda in our community” to be exact) by including the books, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky, "Geography Club" by Brent Hartinger, and "Deal With It! A Whole New Approach to Your Body, Brain and Life as a gURL" by Esther Drill.

I was pleased to see that a member of their community created this blog in response to the situation and I smiled to myself at the site administrators own admission that the choice of the word parent was short-sighted and limiting. Instead of West Bend Parents for Free Speech, it should be West Bend Citizens for Free Speech, but that is a small detail that to his or her credit, the site admin dealt with frankly.

The article I found in Publisher's Weekly does not have as much detail as the blog post from the National Coalition Against Censorship. The tough thing for me to read on that blog is that the Christian Civil Liberties Union is actually working for the right to publicly burn these books - not just remove them.

Reading that brought me full circle back to the Toni Morrison interview when she talked about, first the flattery of being a banned author. Such press drives sales, after all, and upon learning that Song of Solomon was banned in a prison system for fear it could cause a riot, Morrison admits to feeling proud that her words could be so powerful.

She goes on, however, to address the more serious threat censorship plays in our society and in other countries. Though our authors don't have to worry about imprisonment, exile or persecution, even the act of creating "bad press" directly limits free speech.

We've covered the idea that censorship limits the ideas available in a free marketplace a lot in class, but Morrison had a point I hadn't properly mulled over yet: writers of sensitive materials are likely sensitive creatures themselves. Hearing the words "wicked" and "threat to society" will inevitably cause some writers - who are likely not imprisoned in our country - to simply put down the pen. Yes, we have those brave souls, like Chbosky, Hartinger, Salman Rushdie and Morrison herself, who carry on, but who have we lost along the way thanks to critical voices?

I am reminded, in a way of Hartinger's blog post on Self-Censorship and wondering, even if public attempts to ban books are met with staunch resistance by librarians and the public, something immeasurable could still be lost if sensitive content-producers self-censor their own work. The unquantifiable loss of the contribution of ideas hurts us all.