Friday, February 23, 2007

Freedom To Read

I'm a bit late out on this - probably because I only heard about it on the drive into work this morning, but it is "Freedom To Read" week.

Often, we hear about censorship in the guise of "Protecting the Children"(tm), often on the grounds of someone or another's religious morality being offended. However, it goes further into the realm of materials aimed at adults in the first place.

Again, most of the time the screaming is over moral issues, but it can be over a variety of things. We have to walk a very fine line to deal with these situations. On one hand, there are books that we may well deem inappropriate for certain school grades (whether it's too explicit, or it presents a radical politic (e.g. white supremacy politics), or whatever), and yet, outright banning a book because you disagree with it or something it represents is a very dangerous thing to do.

We have some laws around the notion of "hate crimes" that encompass some literature, but those cases are few and far between. (Most "hate literature" is quietly self-published somewhere these days, and seldom makes its way into the mainstream of society)

In general, books contain ideas, and when we step into the world of banning this or that book for whatever reason, we step into the land of declaring ideas "dangerous". I won't say that all ideas are "good ideas", but rather the question becomes how does one decide what ideas are "too dangerous" to be heard? The history of the Roman Catholic Church is riddled with the suppression of ideas deemed "dangerous" - for example, Galileo - but to whom were they dangerous? To the power structure of the Church itself, and nobody else it turns out.

Ultimately, it comes down to this:
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?


Whether we are discussing the law enforcement or censorship.

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