More and more conservatives (and liberals too)  in the US and Canada, who used to believe in freedom are demanding the right to control what other people read. In 2022 many of them  worked hard to ban books.  In Indiana Republican lawmakers are pushing a bill to protect students from “harmful materials at libraries.”  In other words, they want to ban books. Recently Republicans members of a School Board in Tennessee  School Board banned Pulitzer prize-wining graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegleman. That book seems to be about t cats and mice, but is really about Nazis and Jews. Guess who are the cats?

Another Pulitzer prize winning writer, Viet Thanh Nguyen  recently wrote an article in the New York Times called, “My Young Mind was Disturbed by a Book. It Changed My Life.”

As Nguyen said, about banning the book Maus,

“Part of a democracy is having the capacity to engage with difficult, or disagreeable, or even dangerous ideas. So about the banning of a book like Maus, number one I feel sorry for the students or children who would be deprived of the opportunity to read a great book! But number 2, I think it also shows a lot of fear on the part of the parents and politicians who are banning books like Maus because what they don’t want to do is have difficult conversations with their children either about art or about the subjects that a book like Maus raises.”

Part of the rationale the Tennessee school board had to ban Maus was that the book contained scenes of nudity, profanity, and violence.  People objected to the images in the book that showed bare breasted cats (Jews) who were being assaulted by the Nazi cats.

Well, if you want your children or yourself to learn something about the Holocaust they probably have to learn something about nudity, profanity and violence. They sort of come with the territory.  Should young children be protected from learning about nudity, profanity, and violence?  Should the parents or the school board have the right to ban such a book?

Not in my view. Personally, I have young grandchildren and worry about what they learn when unsupervised on the internet or playing video games and things like that. I wish they had someone to curate what they watched or put it into proper context. That is something a teacher or librarian or parent could and should do.

Maus has been curated by a thinking author. It is not pornography. It does show a naked mouse in a bathtub! Horrors! The proper context for discussing such a book would be with a librarian, or teacher, or parent who can teach the context. The problem really is that children have contact with a lot of violence, profanity and nudity outside the classroom. That is where they are unsupervised and there is no one around often to put those things into context. Parents should be much more concerned about that, though I am not arguing in favor of censoring that either. I am in favor of parents and teachers and librarians helping students to understand what they are doing when they go to the internet or social media.

The American Library Association has called banning Maus a part of “an organized assault on the freedom to read.” The freedom to read is a pretty important freedom. One would have thought that in America, the land of the free, the freedom to read would be sacrosanct. It’s not. In fact, it’s under threat.  There have been more than 300 challenges since the school year began.

I was on the board of the Steinbach Public Library many years ago, and I remember we had some challenges too. I was proud that our little board in a very conservative town filled with evangelicals dealt with most of the complaints we received quite well.  Instead of banning books we worked on a statement of intellectual freedom of which I was quite proud. We were armed for the next challenge, which never came while I was on the board. Darn!

Christiane had a problem when she was the chair of the Parent Teacher Association at a local school when a parent objected to a Judy Blume book in the school library even though she had not read it, because she did not like the cover because it suggested to her in some bizarre manner, witchcraft, which she presumed to be wicked. Chris read the book and found it was an excellent book and thankfully, the book was not eliminated from the school library. When I was on the Library board one of our policies would be that we would not consider a complaint about a book by a person unless the person said he or she had read the book.

Freedom can be tricky. I don’t believe in absolute freedom like the members of the mandates convoy. Freedoms can conflict. Nuance is needed to balance one against the other to determine what limits on the freedom are tolerable and what limits are not.

Banning or censoring a book should be the last resort (if at all).  We need to protect children and we must help them to read wisely. Banning books is a crude instrument.