Banning Authors

[talon]

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2022356,00.html

So, instead of banning books (a deplorable practice), some schools are banning authors from their book festivals.

Apparently, they think it's better or more comfortable to ban an author and all that author's works than to ban specific books.

I say censorship of this sort and on this scale is wrong.

I stand with Matt de la Pena, Melissa de la Cruz, Brian Meehl and Tera Lynn Childs in supporting Ellen Hopkins in her banishment. I'm glad the festival was shut down because of lack of author participation, and hope this will send a clear message to school administrators, parents, and students that censorship of any sort, and most particularly blanket censorship, is wrong in America.

Thanks to the internet, book burning is no longer the powerful message it once was. And thanks, no doubt, to the internet once again, for spreading far and wide information about the banishment of an author so the message the school board intended to send becomes a different, more powerful one that ranges farther than a single school's book festival.

I agree that parents need to pay attention to the books their children read, that some books are not appropriate for some ages.

I do not agree that libraries should ban books just because the parents of some of the children in that school don't want their child reading that book. It must, in my opinion, be a unanimous decision, if even one parent wants their child to have access to that book, then it stays in the library. This only applies to public school libraries; in a full public library, absolutely no book should be banned ever. In private libraries, they can ban pretty near every book ever published and I won't say a word - that's the nature of private vs public.

And to ban an author, and thereby the author's entire line of books and stories - bad form, very bad form for a public school.