An Important Freedom

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read
September 27–October 4, 2008

Every year during this week I remember a quote on the wall at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. It was from Heinrich Heine in 1821:

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

It was a moment of awakening to the connections between censorship of ideas and the devaluing of people. We usually want to ban things that challenge what we believe in. It is one of the paradoxes of democracy that it even has to allow ideas that challenge its very foundation.

Philip Pullman author of The Golden Compass, one of the top 10 banned books for 2008 had this to say on the Guardian UK website:

Because they never learn. The inevitable result of trying to ban something – book, film, play, pop song, whatever – is that far more people want to get hold of it than would ever have done if it were left alone. Why don't the censors realise this?...

In fact, when it comes to banning books, religion is the worst reason of the lot. Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed. The rank stench of oppression wafts from every authoritarian church, chapel, temple, mosque, or synagogue – from every place of worship where the priests have the power to meddle in the social and intellectual lives of their flocks, from every presidential palace or prime ministerial office where civil leaders have to pander to religious ones...

My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

Quite an indictment of religion, because that is the source of most of the banning of his book. Unfortunately it does work in some times and places. It sets up a feeling of fear and divisiveness.

So first go the banned books week website or the ALA site. Then go to your library and support give them support, as the ALA says:

Exercise your rights! Check out or re-read a favorite banned book. Encourage your book group to read and discuss one of the books. Give one of your favorite books as a gift. The 100 most challenged books of the 1990s is a good resource!

Join the Freedom to Read Foundation. The Foundation is dedicated to the legal and financial defense of intellectual freedom, especially in libraries. You can also support the cause by buying Banned Books Week posters, buttons and T-shirts online.

In my humble opinion, it is one of the essentials that needs to be held tight and celebrated.