Banning of Books & the Evaluations of Books Being Banned IS a Dead-End

The FIRST AMENDMENT, being, debated on, freedom of the PRESS, remember???  A discussion on making the various kinds of materials, of various topics including LGBT available for children and schools to select from, censorship in the 21^st Century here, off of the Front Page Sections, translated…

The American libraries and the publishing companies every year during the last week of September, had hosted the “Banned Books Week”, this year, the activities is from September 27^th to October 3^rd.  But the BBW’s is not advocating doing away with banned books, but, making the banned books available to the mass public to read.

This activity had started from thirty-eight years ago, the original goal was to advocate the First Amendment’s Freedom of the Press, to show that people have the right to choose what they want to read.  Because, even in the U.S., which is claimed as the most advanced, most developed country in the world, there are the differences of cultures, groups, schools, communities that hold different religious beliefs, values, that forces the locals or the students to not read materials of their choosing (for instance, taking books off of the library shelves, banning students from reading certain things, even burning of books in public).  The purpose of the BBS is to advocate the doing away with banning of reading materials.  Each year, the activities revolved around holding the conferences, the lectures, posting out the flyers, handing out the bookmarks, the flyers, and screening of the various movies that showed of how the publishing industries don’t have their freedoms to publish whatever they wanted.

a “partial” of what that consisted of…found online

The main theme of the BBW is “Censorship and book banning is a dead-end”, on the poster, there was a huge labyrinth, that you can’t get to the end goal of “reading”; BBW wanted everybody to fight for her/his own right to be able to choose what s/he wants to read.

The U.S. had been on the road to freedom since 1776, and yet, every year, there are still many book bans, and the limitations on what people can read, this is the same in Taiwan too.  There was an illustrated book by the British writer, David Williams awhile ago, “The Boy in the Dress”, which the parents believed was advocating children to become cross-dressers, and they’d demanded that the school libraries take the book off the shelves.  And this year, there was the “King and the King, which involved the LGBT discussions that the parents demanded the schools to take off the shelves.

Actually, it’s natural, that we all have different points of views, but it’s like “even though you and I don’t agree on the same things, but I will, fight for your right to believe what you want to believe”, the libraries, the schools shouldn’t take the books that some parents believed to be improper off the shelves.  The subject of cross-dressers, transvestites, homosexuality, many people may not agree on, but there are those in the society, and we need to respect their right to have the materials that they can relate to.

The libraries, in selection of books, can go by the experts or the books selectors’ choices, to find the good books to add to the list, to NOT get kidnapped by the councilmembers, to buy the improper reading materials; and considering the contents, offering the age-appropriate materials which the teachers and parents can read-along with their students and children……………to allow everybody to have at least one book they feel that connection with.  But remember, once a book is on the shelves, it should NEVER be taken off because someone found it unfitting to their own values of gender, sexuality, race, or religious beliefs.

The banning of books, and censoring of the reading materials are already dead-ends, in the information technology age, who can force whom to not read what?

And so, this, is on the appropriateness of the reading materials that the libraries should provide for the readers, and we’d just voted on the matter awhile ago, and we must, not censor any of the reading materials, because by censoring the materials, we won’t be living under the freedom of the PRESS anymore, and freedom of the PRESS is one of the first amendment rights of the U.S. Constitution, the BILL of RIGHTS, isn’t it?  If the country censors the reading materials now, think of how it will, CONTROL our behaviors later on?