Henrietta Hay's Column

"Celebrate Freedom. Read a banned book." I have a new sweat shirt that has those words on it along with a few of the titles that have been censored including "A Farewell to Arms," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Color Purple," "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Of Mice and Men." I also have a poster with a huge red X slashed across the titles of most of the favorite books of any erudite reader. The heading of that poster in flaming letters is "CENSORED"

This is Banned Books Week, sponsored each year by the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors along with several other groups. The books that have been banned through the centuries include nearly all the classics in most languages. No printed word is beyond the reach of the eager censor.

We Americans did not invent censorship. The writings of Homer and Aristophenes were suppressed in Greece in the 4th century B. C. and Socrates drank the hemlock because he was "corrupting the young" with ideas of freedom. In China the works of Confucius were consigned to the flames along with hundreds of his disciples. Dante's Divine Comedy was publicly burned in Italy and Galileo was forced to recant the thesis that the planets circulate around the sun.

Book banning has three principle targets--religious, political and moral expression. The real aim of the censor is to stop the free flow of ideas, any ideas that the censor does not like. Justice Potter Stewart said, "Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime..."

Our Founding Fathers knew this, and we are eternally thankful to them for trying to protect us by putting these words in the First Amendment to the Constitution. "Congress shall pass no law . . . abridging freedom of speech or the press." But the First Amendment has been under attack from the beginning. Today attempts to limit what we may read are threatening libraries and bookstores across the country.

The reasons given for protest are often far beyond the understanding of reasonable people. Even dictionaries are not above the fray. The Merriam Webster Collegiate has been banned in some places because, "it defines obscene words." The American Heritage Dictionary has also been removed from several school libraries because it contains "objectionable language." Objectionable language? Dictionaries contain words. Words are simply tools for communication. They are good or bad, uplifting or objectionable, depending on their use. One has to wonder how the would be censors think humankind could have survived without them.

The Alabama State Textbook Committee called for the rejection of "The Diary of Anne Frank" because "the book is a real downer." Yes, being Jewish in Germany in 1944 was a "downer" and Anne's life was all too short. But to deny to our young people, in the guise of protection, knowledge of her life is to assume that they cannot think for themselves. In 1976 I stood in the room in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family were hidden. The windows had been uncovered and I could see the back garden, but the sunshine did not penetrate the room or the secret stairways. The feel of prison and suffering and fear was still in it even 30 years later. But Anne's diary is full of courage and grace and hope. The censors would take that away from us.

The world is full of bad books along with the fine ones. Nobody ever censored a book for bad writing. The ones I don't want to read I don't have to read. But I have no right, patriotic, religious or moral, to deny any of them to you. We're a lot smarter than the censors think we are.

Justice Douglas said that, "Restrictions of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

Go out and be patriotic. Read a Banned Book Today.