It's not Censorship, It's parenting! (Or is it?)

In a November 18th post on Mercator.net, writer Erin Manning presents us with a dazzling display of ideology shutting down all logic.  The opinions she expresses are dear to SafeLibraries' heart, as he repeats her entire article on his blog.

Ms. Manning engages in a huge error of binary thinking, assuming that parenting cannot be censorship, even if one is trying to "parent" somebody else's children, and the "parenting" includes deciding what somebody else's child can read.  She clearly does not understand the definition either of parenting or of censorship.

Manning claims that since most challenges come from parents, these challenges are somehow beyond any wrongdoing.  She seems unaware that even if their motivations are pure, parents don't agree even with each other about what a given child should or should not read, let alone with a school board or library board.  She seems to think that parents who challenge books are making informed judgments, ignoring the history of book challenges, which shows that few challengers ever read the books they challenge.

She crosses the line from spin to either ignorance or  outright deception when she writes:

To put it bluntly, the ALA puts itself in the position of defending lousy, substandard, second-rate writing that would probably not even be published in the first place, were it not for the insatiable appetite for inappropriate content usually euphemised as "dark"or "edgy" by the sort of pre-teen who thinks angsty, brooding, sparkly vampires are a good idea.

Even a quick scan of the ALA sources she's obviously checked reveals the extreme falseness of this statement: many a challenged book is an award winner, some even of Pulitzers and Nobels.

And the list of what she thinks is bannable! Not just obscenity or pornography, but a list of objectionables that would pretty much empty library shelves of all but the most mind-numbing pablum: sex, drinking, drugs, profanity, "chat speak," prostitution, witchcraft, voodoo, devil worship, violence, implied sex, anti-religious and anti-Christian messages, homosexuality, suicide, nudity, eating disorders, and smoking (I assume she did not intend this as a complete list).


And after labeling almost any piece of worthwhile literature "inappropriate for children," she has the gall to claim that "removing books that are inappropriate for our kids is not the same as banning books."  The same self-contradicting statement is made by many censors across the U.S.: "we don't want to ban anything, we just want to remove . . . ."  Ms. Manning made a serious blunder years ago when she decided not to take that introductory course in logic and critical thinking.