Books & Bits: An insight into book banning

“Once you learn to read, you will be free forever.” – Frederick Douglass. In a nutshell, that’s the core of the First Amendment – guaranteeing our freedom to read will ensure we can remain free to pursue our hopes and dreams. During October, libraries across the United States try to create awareness of the importance of this freedom and the challenges that inherently come to it.

The library has a window display “I’m with the Banned,” which generates comments when people see some of the books that have been banned. Reactions? Shock, dismay – “Who would want to ban…”? Book banning is a form of censorship. It happens when material is removed from a library, a reading list or even bookstore shelves because of an objection to the content, ideas or images. In this column, I thought I’d take a moment to explain book banning.

The Supreme Court has made very few limits on the Freedom of Speech. The Miller test, a three-prong test, is the U. S. Supreme Court’s test for determining whether an item is labeled obscene in which case it is not protected by the Constitution and can be prohibited. The criteria are 1) whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, “taken as a whole” appeals to “prurient interest” 2) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and 3) whether the work, “taken as a whole,” lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Certainly, there is a lot of interpretation within this test. Child pornography is an example of material that fits these criteria and is not protected under the First Amendment: it is banned.

During the 2023 North Dakota legislative session, House Bill 1205 passed and was signed into law by Governor Burgum. The bill, addresses only children’s collections in libraries, thus ensuring library patrons have access to ideas and content, but children are protected from exposure to “explicit sexual material.” The wording of the bill, in essence, supports and reiterates the Miller test for obscenity.

When a person or organization brings forth an objection to a material in a library, it is called a book challenge. This usually happen with the best intentions – to protect others, often children, from difficult ideas or information. The American Library Association documented 2,571 book challenges in 2022. A decision is made about whether to keep the item or remove it from the library’s collection. When a book is removed from a library, it is banned. In this situation, the banned book is NOT banned across the nation. It is not banned from publication. It is not banned from reading.

I am grateful to our library’s Board of Directors for our community’s strong support of the Freedom to read. It just would not be the America I love without this freedom. Not everything written is great literature, and I haven’t read or enjoyed every book in our library, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right for someone. What’s most important is that we provide a variety of books, which encourages reading.

As author Ray Bradbury once said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Find the books that are just right for you,

and, please, don’t stop reading.