Opinion/Editorial: Book banners turn literature into pornography

2022-10-17 06:14:36 By : Mr. Fancy Yunnan

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The Madison County School Board has begun work on a policy regarding sexually explicit materials, including library books.

Collectively, the “sexually explicit” books the Madison County School Board could ban from libraries comprise serious literature from which students would profit.

Among the books proposed for censorship are five novels which explore themes of slavery and race relations by Toni Morrison. Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the French Legion of Honor.

The book banners of Madison County want parents and their children to believe Morrison is a pornographer. Through the narrow lens of their personal discomfort with sexuality, they would deny students the right to explore works of art dealing with some of the nation’s most serious issues.

Those issues will not go away by refusing access to books.

The sex in Toni Morrison’s novels is not sexy. Nor it is prurient. It usually reflects violence and repression aimed at women and people of color. This is not going to lure any child into lascivious behavior. Banning these books will only keep children from grasping the need for compassion and respect.

Many of the book banners of Madison County base their objections on Christianity.

So, WWJD with Toni Morrison?

We believe he’d use her novels to inspire an end to sexual violence and exploitation. He would bring different races together instead of tearing them apart.

The state already wants schools to give parents a 30-day notice before using materials involving sex in classroom teaching. If the issue here is parental control in sex education, moms and dads still have the right – and responsibility – to have “the talk” with their kids. That includes the right—and responsibility – to answer questions about feelings as well as anatomy that every child experiences and hears about from friends. Stripping bookshelves in school classrooms and libraries to bare wood will not stop curiosity.

If “sexually explicit” is the benchmark for censorship, parents can cancel cable and collect cellphones.

Those who believe they can control their kids by starving them of fine literature delude themselves. But when they try to impose that imperative on everybody else’s children, they become moral dictators.

Madison County already has a very structured and reasonable process for judging challenged books. It requires written explanations of specific complaints investigated by a committee that includes a parent and administrators. Above all, it requires actually reading the books in question. But that may not matter because all decisions can be appealed to the school board, which has made censorship a political litmus test.

This ignores the secret ingredient of judging literature.

Besides many of Toni Morrison’s novels, the book banners of Madison County hope to get rid of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Atwood has won two Booker Prizes, England’s highest literary award. “The Handmaid’s Tale” explores a dystopian, male-dominated society in which women have lost the right to control their bodies. Some women have been forced to be vessels that carry the children of powerful men.

Atwood published the novel in 1987. These days it scares opponents of women’s reproductive rights. They just won a big victory when the U.S. Supreme Court took away women’s control of their bodies and handed it to male-dominated state legislatures. A number of those legislatures already have passed forced pregnancy laws that outlaw abortion and could criminalize those who seek to end pregnancies, sometimes in cases of rape and incest.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” is about forced formication. The only sexual behavior it could possibly inspire is criminal. Yet someone in Madison County complained that the book is also “anti-religious.”

We struggle to imagine the religion of the offended party. But, in fairness, misogynistic sects that abuse women do exist. So we feel compelled to offer a prayer: Mother God, please help the Madison County School Board decide that “The Handmaid’s Tale” is not sacrilegious.

Finally, we come to the grossest distortion on the Madison County banned books list. David Guterson’s “Snow Falling on Cedars” looks at prejudices that led to internment of Japanese-American citizens in World War II. It also looks at lingering bias in the murder trial of a young Japanese-American man accused of killing a white man in 1954.

The book won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It spawned a movie rated PG-13. Yet the book banners of Madison County say it should not be allowed in any middle or high school because it is “sexually explicit.”

If that’s not unconstitutional, it is surely unconscionable.

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The Madison County School Board has begun work on a policy regarding sexually explicit materials, including library books.

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