The American Library Association annually sponsors “Banned Books Week.”  Jonah Goldberg wrote an excellent article exposing the exaggerations and distortions used to evoke ominous (but dubious) images of Nazi-like government officials censoring books:

The problem: None of this is remotely true. Banned Books Week is an exercise in propaganda. For starters, as a legal matter no book in America is banned, period, full stop (not counting, I suppose, some hard-core illegal child porn or some such out there). Any citizen can go to a bookstore or Amazon.com and buy any book legally in print — or out of print for that matter.

    From my years litigating First Amendment cases around the nation, I agree with Goldberg that the American Library Association defines as “censorship” something many people would define as “good parenting.”  Many of the incidents involve parents questioning whether a book is age-appropriate, whether the library should limit reading of the book to young people above a certain age, and not make it available to children. Asking a school official or a librarian to limit access to a book to older children and adults is not “censorship.”

As usual, the American Library Association ignores situations that arguably are better examples of “censorship.”   ADF, in the case of Nampa Classical Academy v. Goesling, is challenging the Idaho Public Charter School Commission’s full ban on the use of texts and documents deemed to be “religious” even if they are classical books in Western Civilization taught with regard to their literary and historical importance. This book ban applies to every public school, including those at the university level.

David Cortman, the ADF attorney handling the case, said that “[t]he mere fact that a classical text is religious does not mean it has no educational value. The Supreme Court itself has clearly acknowledged this.”   Cortman also said that “[w]hen government officials ban the objective study of all religious texts, including the most important literary works of all time–such as the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and the Odyssey–it only contributes to the further dumbing down of public school education. It’s no wonder that the call for school choice has become so popular.”

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