First of all, nobody put me in charge of ranking sins so I may be way off base with this blog. However, I feel a need to have my say. From all the posts I’ve seen recently about censorship and banning of books, I am not looking at an occasional problem.
My incentive for this blog started with a book I checked out of the library. A previous patron had taken it upon herself to mark out words that offended her with a black pen. (I know. It may have been a man, but I doubt it.) Trying to be fair, I would assume she thought she was doing the next readers a favor by eliminating “bad” words so they would not have to read them. At least in my case, she called attention to words I would have sped by, and I think I guessed every one as I paused for her black marker.
I began to question her reasoning. I would guess she thought she was making the world more morally correct. Pursuing this idea, I wondered which of the Ten Commandments she was keeping. The only ones pertaining to language say not to bear false witness and not to take God’s name in vain. The words she marked out broke neither of these. There is another commandment that says, “Thou shalt not steal,” and I contend that she did break this one when she damaged property that did not belong to her but to the library and its patrons. So, I ask, which is the greater sin? As I said, I am not in charge of ranking sins, so I will just leave this question out there.
I have stopped reading books when the details were too explicit or the language too profane for my taste. That is an absolute right, in the same way that I get to choose how much Louisiana hot sauce I put in my chili. It is not my right to choose how much hot sauce or intensity for someone else. Incidentally, the previous library patron must not have finished the book or her pen ran out of ink since there were far more wicked words, by standard rankings, in the second half of the book that she failed to mark out.
I had hardly finished that book when the current furor over censorship and banning books broke out in the regular and social media. The primary current target is the graphic novel, Maus, a story rooted in the Holocaust. In the end, I find myself amused at the results of this furor. Currently, after the wisdom in the state of Tennessee to ban the book, it is now #2 on Amazon. Years of experience in teaching junior high and seeing which books caused a kerfuffle, I am guessing that the real problem is that this book causes kids to think – like Lois Lowry’s often banned The Giver, that I read to my students every year.