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Mostly Cloudy Library takes a stand against unparalleled book banning
Give people a choice, library director says
There were a seemingly unprecedented number of attempts to ban books across the nation last year.
The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked more than 700 bids to challenge or remove nearly 1,600 books — the most since the organization began collecting censorship data 30 years ago.
In response, the Baldwin Public Library has promoted the Unite Against Book Bans campaign, which promotes a diversity of books to open young minds to a larger worldview. Library director Elizabeth Olesh said that virtually every book the library contains could offend someone in some way, but, “I don’t think it is appropriate for a library to exclude materials or limit access to the larger community because it includes potentially objectionable content.”
That objectionable content, Olesh has noticed, is usually targeted “at materials that deal with Black, Indigenous and people of color or LGBTQIA+ issues.”
Many parents, she reasoned, feel they are protecting their children from sensitive and complex issues that are difficult to confront head on.
But limiting their access, Olesh added, “doesn’t protect them from life’s complex and challenging issues. On the contrary, reading a book can be a way to understand and process a tough topic.”
“Anybody that bans a book is the best thing a publicity agent could ever have — thank you for helping me sell more copies,” the filmmaker John Waters told the Herald with a laugh. Waters is known for focusing on sensitive and offensive topics in his films while at the same time making light of them, and has done so in books as well, among them “Shock Value” (1981) and “Role Models” (2010).
The ALA notes on its website that attempts to control what people read are nothing new. Asking the question, “Who Challenges Books?” it answers, “Throughout history, more and different kinds of people and groups of all persuasions than you might first suppose, who, for all sorts of reasons, have attempted — and continue to attempt — to suppress anything that conflicts with or anyone who disagrees with their own beliefs.”
“I believe in the freedom to read, and public libraries do not function in loco parentis,” Olesh said, using the Latin term for “in place of a parent.”
She emphasizes that the free exchange of ideas is fundamental to this — and any — democracy.
“It is the responsibility of parents and guardians to be aware of what their kids are reading, if they’re concerned about specific issues or types of materials. At the same time, a parent does not have the right to limit what another person’s child reads. Banning books is a slippery slope to the erosion of our freedom of expression.”
In her eight years at the Baldwin library, Olesh has not seen any challenges to books it offers.
“As a public library, we offer materials on a wide range of issues, including some that might be considered controversial,” she said.
“People are welcome to read or bypass whatever they choose.”
Removing books infringe on the rights of the community, Olesh contended, adding that the library’s fiction collection is collectively funded and professionally staffed to provide resources to all Baldwinites.
“Many of the latest challenges have not been initiated by individuals,” she said of the past year’s news of efforts to ban books, or serious discussion of doing so, in a number of states around the U.S. “Rather, these challenges are campaigns designed by political organizations to target schools and public libraries.”
