The Censorship We Should Fear

If you weren’t aware—and there is no real reason why you should be aware unless you are involved in some way with books—this past week was Banned Books Week. This week always annoys me. It is when every elitist Manhattenite in the book industry laughs at the quaint, religious, backwater yokels who are afraid that their children will become witches after reading Harry Potter.

Now, I don’t agree with most of the challenges that are raised against many books—I don’t think that reading Harry Potter will make anyone a witch—but I do think that we should be very careful about what we expose children to. I am not a parent, but I hope to be one someday, and I will be sure to keep explicit sex, violence, drug use, profanity and the like away from them. I plan on making careful and informed decisions about what I allow them to read, watch, listen to, etc.

One of the big stories in Banned Book Week was about someone calling the book Speak “soft porn,” obviously implying that it isn’t appropriate for the audience it was written for: teenagers. Recently, some people have even called for a book rating system. This makes people in the book industry scream about their First Amendment rights. They argue that a rating system will affect what an author writes because he or she will be writing for a specific rating. They see it as a form or censorship.

I see it as a matter of trust. Parents don’t trust authors and publishers to produce literature that is appropriate for the age that it’s targeting. They go to great lengths to encourage their children to read only to find that they don’t approve of what passes for children’s literature these days. Because that trust has been shattered, they feel like they need some way to control what their child reads short of prereading everything. If publishers and authors were trustworthy, we wouldn’t have this problem. If a rating system for books was enacted, I would prefer it to be more like this website’s movie ratings.

But I also think that this distracts us from the censorship that we should be looking out for. The First Amendment wasn’t written to stop some soccer mom from keeping Twilight off the shelves of the local elementary school library. It was written to prevent the government from silencing dissent. Everyone has the freedom to say or write or publish whatever they want. That’s an inalienable right. That doesn’t mean, though, that anyone has to listen to them. Choosing not to listen is not censorship. Preventing from speaking is. The soccer mom doesn’t have that power on a large enough scale to matter. The government does.