I read “Banned Books Week: Smoke Screen of Hypocrisy” today in WorldNetDaily, which claims to be “a fiercely independent newssite committed to hard-hitting investigative reporting of government waste, fraud and abuse.” (Does anyone know anything more about them? Their mission statement makes no mention of political or religious bias, but their ads make them look like a Christian paper.)
In any event, the column is an “exclusive commentary” by the president of Mission America, which “monitors homosexual activism in youth culture.” The point of the column is that librarians are hypocrites about Banned Books Week because we practice censorship all the time, by buying a disproportionately large number of books showing homosexuality in a positive light (for example), and neglecting to balance that collection with publications from the other side of the issue. Librarians have an agenda, argues the author, and anyone who controls access to information based on their agenda is a censor. And the thing is, she’s kind of right.
I’m not in charge of purchasing at my library. (And one could argue that we’re a special case anyway, since we’re a private school. We don’t hide our “agenda” — acceptance of homosexuality, treating evolution as science and creationism as religious belief, etc. — from the parents who choose to pay us to educate their children.) But I know what we buy, and it ain’t anti-gay religious tracts. I was pretty familiar with the collection and purchasing decisions at the Cambridge public high school too, and…well, let’s just say that my first task when I started working there was to order everything on the GLSEN recommended book list. No one ever asked me to order the Mission America book list.
Of course, part of the problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a Mission America book list. Fiction about gay teens with a “pro-homosexual” (read: the gay kids end up comfortable with their sexuality and maybe even in a happy relationship) viewpoint is published by mainstream publishers, which is where most librarians get their books. There isn’t a corresponding outpouring of mainstream novels about kids who find Jesus and are cured of their homosexuality (and hey, to editorialize for a minute — that’s good news!), so buying them requires digging that most librarians don’t bother to do — if those books exist at all at the level of quality one expects in one’s library collection.
Another part of the problem is that it’s very difficult to search a library catalog for a specific point of view. One of the basic principles of cataloging is that pro- and anti- books are classified under the same subject heading. This means they show up next to each other, saving the library from any appearance of bias, but it also means there’s no handy “Homosexuality–Religious Right’s Point of View” subject heading to search by.
But if I’m being honest with myself, I know that libraries don’t do all they could to present a balanced view of these issues. The part of me that finds the religious right’s views abhorrent is a-ok with that, but the part of me that believes in the librarian’s Hippocratic Oath of free access to information is bothered that we use tax dollars to promote an agenda.
Q:Librarians, how do you handle this question? Do you even see it as a problem? What about the rest of you? Do libraries have an obligation to supply reading material equally on both sides of any issue?
0 responses so far ↓
1 colorwheel // Sep 26, 2005 at 10:34 pm
Can I add a question rather than answering any? :D
Has anyone noticed that all those supposedly-pro-homosexuality kids’ books have an enormously high proportion of miserable endings? (Higher than kids’ books in general, I think.) Sometimes they do have the trademark bit’o'hope at the end, but almost always after awful violence or, at the very least, a traumatic breakup involving public exposure?
Don’t worry, I’m not arguing that they’re anti-gay the same way Mission America books about homosexuality would be. But still, I find it daunting.
</hijacking your blog>
2 jadelennox // Sep 26, 2005 at 11:47 pm
WND is a just-this-side-of-sane right wing site. Just barely. Sometimes.
The thing about challenged books vs. library selection policies is who is doing the selection. When a librarian self-censors (and everyone does, whether to push a subtle or explicit bias — how many anti-library books are you going to find in the local library, after all? — to avoid controversy, or simply to pick the best books for a limited budget) it’s the *librarian*, the trained professional, doing the selecting. When a book is challenged, it’s by an outisder. To the best of my knowledge, a book doesn’t make it on to the BBW list because a librarian decide to purchase a selection and his boss told him not to.
By the same token, if my conregration’s junior rabbi or minister decides that the reading for the week should be about Genesis 12, that’s his business. If the head rabbi or minister disagrees, that’s their business. But if I’m pissed off because Genesis 12 is about (*goes and checks*) (*ooh, that’s lech lecha!*) Abram and Sarai’s weird incest thing with Pharoah, and I go to the board of directors and kick up a fuss, and say the rabbi shouldn’t do that portion, Because Of The Children, and the rabbi gets shut down because the board is my bitch? That’s censorship. The professional not being allowed to do the job he was hired to do.
As for pro vs anti homosexuality, I’d say that the bias of books in general is to be pro rather than anti people. You’re going to see some books from mainstream publishers about being pro-gay, and *vastly* more about being pro-straight (or at least happily and unquestioningly heteronormative), but outside of specifically religious publishers, you won’t see too many that are anti-straight, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-white, anti-republican, anti-democrat… You’ll see anti-jerk, and because of the strong pro-reader bias of fiction, you might see some anti-jock and anti-popular girl. But mostly books, and children’s books especially, don’t waste their energy being anti.
3 Sam // Oct 3, 2005 at 10:27 am
>That’s censorship. The professional not being
> allowed to do the job he was hired to do.
That’s interesting. I tend to look at it more from the point of view of the patron/consumer. If someone is being told she can’t have access to something because someone else doesn’t think she should, that strikes me as censorship, whether that someone is a trained professional or not. Obviously she could just go google “gay people are satan” and get all the anti-gay propaganda she wants, but the point is that someone in a power position is restricting her options. (Note that I haven’t pushed this to all its possible logical conclusions yet, so please poke holes in it.)
> As for pro vs anti homosexuality, I’d say that the bias of books in
> general is to be pro rather than anti people. …
> You’ll see anti-jerk, and because of the strong pro-reader bias of
> fiction, you might see some anti-jock and anti-popular girl. But
> mostly books, and children’s books especially, don’t waste their
> energy being anti.
That’s a good point. There are exceptions - mostly things that everyone is anti, like gang members, child abusers, and puppy kickers - but in general I think you’re probably right about that.
4 Sam // Oct 3, 2005 at 10:28 am
> Has anyone noticed that all those supposedly-pro-homosexuality kids’
> books have an enormously high proportion of miserable endings?
> (Higher than kids’ books in general, I think.)
This certainly used to be true. Back in the 80s and 90s, they almost exclusively had miserable endings. But I think that’s changed a lot. My library is so queer-friendly the shelves are practically rainbow colored, so I think I see a decent sample of new gay fiction, and most of the books have hopeful endings. Not necessarily “and then I got a girlfriend and lived happily ever after,” because really, how many people live happily ever after with their high school sweethearts? But “hey, this is who I am, and I’m cool with that,” at the very least.
Do you have examples of recent books that are like that?
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