The Fires of Censorship Still Burn

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.” John Milton, Areopagitica

~.~

As many of you know, the fandom went through a period of censorship a little while ago. Many beloved stories were removed from fanfiction.com, and despite the efforts of petitions and personal pleas sent to the administrators, the purge went on. Some of the stories will never return, and will exist only as traded files amongst the few.

Banned Books Week ended a few days ago, but it's an issue of which we should be aware year-round. Nearly every day, there's another story in the media concerning the efforts by a tiny, yet noisy, number of people who seek to ban books from schools and libraries (books they often haven't even read except to skim through and cull "objectionable" parts for their complaint.)

Author Pat Conroy wrote a beautiful letter in response to two of his books being banned by a school board, which was published in the local newspaper. It's long, so I won't repost it in its entirety, but you can read it here, at Letters of Note.

October 24, 2007 

To the Editor of the Charleston Gazette:

I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music.

[...]

I've enjoyed a lifetime love affair with English teachers, just like the ones who are being abused in Charleston, West Virginia, today. My English teachers pushed me to be smart and inquisitive, and they taught me the great books of the world with passion and cunning and love. Like your English teachers, they didn't have any money either, but they lived in the bright fires of their imaginations, and they taught because they were born to teach the prettiest language in the world. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid. They take an unutterable joy in opening up the known world to their students, but they are dishonored and unpraised because of the scandalous paychecks they receive. In my travels around this country, I have discovered that America hates its teachers, and I could not tell you why. Charleston, West Virginia, is showing clear signs of really hurting theirs, and I would be cautious about the word getting out.

[...]

About the novels your county just censored: The Prince of Tides and Beach Music are two of my darlings which I would place before the altar of God and say, "Lord, this is how I found the world you made." 

[..]

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

[...]

The school board of Charleston, West Virginia, has sullied that gift and shamed themselves and their community. You've now entered the ranks of censors, book-banners, and teacher-haters, and the word will spread. Good teachers will avoid you as though you had cholera. But here is my favorite thing: Because you banned my books, every kid in that county will read them, every single one of them. Because book-banners are invariably idiots, they don't know how the world works—but writers and English teachers do.

~.~ 

As has been said before, all it take for the wrong thing to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Bibliophiles need to become more noisy than those who would seek to suppress. Snuff the flames!