Return to Celebrate Freedom Introduction
For IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 3, 1995
How far can school boards or administrators go in imposing their own moral, political, or even religious beliefs on curriculum and library choices? How far can they acquiesce in ideologically driven demands for censorship by parents or community groups? Countless censorship incidents throughout the country raise these questions; cases being handled by the ACLU are seeking some answers.
Caught in the tug of war are hard-pressed teachers and librarians, most of them conscientiously trying to maintain professional standards of secular public education and open intellectual inquiry. Also caught in the crossfire are students, who are learning some dramatic lessons about democracy and tolerance as they witness political battles over what ideas, words, and subjects they will be permitted to learn about in school.
In 1982, the Supreme Court decided Island Trees School District v. Pico, a New York censorship case involving ten books that the Island Trees Village school board had removed from the school library because it considered them "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy." Among the books were Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, and Alice Childress' A Hero Ain't Nothing But a Sandwich.
While conceding broad discretion to school boards and administrators to frame curriculum, and to inculcate civic and moral values, the Supreme Court in Pico announced important limits to this discretion. The First Amendment, it said, includes the "right to receive ideas," especially in the special context of a school library, where "a student can literally explore the unknown." School officials, said the Court, may not engage in the "narrowly partisan suppression of ideas" by removing books simply because they disagree with the ideas they contain.
Six years later, in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the Supreme Court reiterated that local school officials have broad discretion to control curriculum (including, in that case, a student newspaper produced as part of a journalism class). But administrators' decisions must be based on "legitimate pedagogical concerns." The Court left open the question whether a broader standard for students' free expression and inquiry might apply to school libraries.
The dividing line between the "narrowly partisan suppression of ideas" condemned by the Supreme Court in Pico, and the "legitimate pedagogical concerns" that it approved in Hazelwood, is constantly being tested. In one ACLU library censorship suit in Olathe, Kansas, students, parents and a teacher are challenging a district superintendent's unilateral decision to remove all copies of a gay-themed book, Nancy Gardner's Annie on My Mind, from all school libraries in the district. The superintendent, Ron Wimmer, had been hoping to avoid the ugly controversy that had engulfed neighboring communities when Annie and another gay-themed novel for young readers were donated to high school libraries. That controversy had included, in the preceding months, a public book burning by a homophobic community group on the steps of the neighboring Kansas City School District offices. Superintendent Wimmer not only refused to accept the donated books but ordered the removal of all copies of Annie on My Mind that were already in the collections of several school libraries in the district.
In this case, the literary and educational value of Annie On My Mind was undisputed, as an official book review committee affirmed. Superintendent Wimmer's repeatedly stated reasons for rejecting the committee's recommendation, and ignoring established procedures for addressing challenges to library books, was that he wanted to make a unilateral decision that would quickly get rid of the book and thus "avoid controversy." The Olathe school board affirmed Superintendent's Wimmer's decision.
The plaintiff parents, students, and teacher in this case, represented by the ACLU, are arguing that Annie was removed from school library shelves on ideological grounds, and in violation of established procedures, because the ideas expressed in the book are sympathetic to homosexuality; and that such attempts to suppress ideas violate the Supreme Court's decision in Pico. The school board attorneys have indicated that their defense, at least in part, will be that the board and superintendent had a legitimate pedagogical desire to teach students that homosexuality is wrong.
The Annie controversy in Kansas typifies numerous incidents of homophobia-driven book banning around the country. Another school library case in Louisiana is representative of often religiously inspired efforts to censor books because they discuss "the occult." In Delcarpio v. St. Tammany Parish School Board, the ACLU represents a group of parents and children who are contesting the school board's removal from school libraries of Jim Haskins' Voodoo and Hoodoo. The board was responding to complaints from a parent associated with the local Christian Coalition. Haskins' book traces the development of voodoo from its origins in Africa to magical practices in Caribbean and Louisiana culture.
The St. Tammany School Board, ignoring a review committee that found legitimate educational value in the book, ordered its removal for two reasons: explicitly religious objections to the beliefs described, and expressed fears that children might imitate some of the "hexes" that were included. A federal district court judge ruled in October 1994 that both reasons were unconstitutional. Disapproval of the religious ideas described in a book is not a legitimate reason for censorship under Pico; and banning books out of fear that occasionally readers might act on the ideas they contain is just another form of thought control, according to the court. The school board is appealing the decision, arguing among other things that Pico should not be followed because there was not one majority opinion for the Supreme Court in that case.
Only a tiny fraction of the school censorship incidents that occur are actually brought to court. In some instances, parents, teachers, students, librarians, and others in the community are able to organize and stop censorship campaigns. In Oconee County, Georgia several months ago, for example, community organizing by anti-censorship citizens persuaded the school board to rescind its decision that all "sexually explicit" books must be removed from school libraries. One of the anti-censorship group's slogans was "Reading is Fundamental, not Fundamentalist." In Oregon, voters have twice rejected statewide initiatives that would ban any books from public and school libraries that reflect affirmatively on homosexuality.
Homosexuality was also an issue, along with menstruation and alleged racial slurs, in an epidemic of censorship at Hempfield High School in Western Pennsylvania last fall. The superintendent ordered confiscation of a literature anthology used in an upper-level English course after he discovered the word "nigger" in an excerpt from Ralph Ellison's masterpiece, Invisible Man, as well sexual imagery in writings by the respected African American poet Nikki Giovanni. The book was literally taken from the hands of students. A fundamentalist activist who was vociferous in her opposition to the anthology also objected to a brief reference to homosexuality in a story by Edmund White. The English teachers who had been using the anthology brought a union grievance, arguing that the unilateral actions of their bosses violated established policy and procedure for challenges to curriculum materials. The administration denied the grievance.
School book censorship is often but not always generated by those with strongly held conservative fundamentalist beliefs, and little appreciation for the values of tolerance, diversity, or intellectual inquiry. But of the many hundreds of incidents that are documented each year, some proportion also arise from objections that particular language or themes are racist or sexist, or otherwise do not reflect liberal and humane values. Indeed, demands for censorship of allegedly "sexist" works often come from both right and left, where critics complain that sexual content in books or other curriculum materials is necessarily "degrading" to girls and women.
Thus, the urge to censor is hardly the monopoly of any political group. But the greatest threat today comes from the fundamentalist right, with its ideological hostility to other religious or philosophical systems, to homosexuality, to sex education, and indeed to the basic idea of secular education.
Copyright 1995, American Civil Liberties Union
Reprinted with permission of the American Civil Liberties Union
http://www.aclu.org