I've watched from a distance two recent conflagrations over the supposed censorship of reading materials. Both pitted the same dueling sensibilities against each other, and frankly I found myself with a foot in each camp.
The Jessamine County Public Library fired two employees, Sharon Cook and Beth Boisvert, after they went to extraordinary lengths to prevent an 11-year-old from checking out The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, a graphic novel that struck them as obscene because it contains sexually explicit art.
In Mount Sterling, where I live, we've seen an emotional battle over several young-adult novels on a Montgomery County High School English teacher's optional reading list for students. The debate continued for weeks in the school system and in the letters section of the Mount Sterling Advocate.
A group of parents protested the books — which weren't required reading, but were available for students who chose to read them — on the grounds they were morally unfit for high school students. The novels apparently portray teenagers who are struggling with dysfunctional families, sexual desire and thoughts of suicide.
Dysfunctional families? Teen sex? Suicide?
I initially assumed the parents were trying to ban Romeo and Juliet. Or the Bible.
What bothers me most about such fights is that, once they start, common sense takes wings and zooms off to Neptune.
On one side you have adults of a socially conservative, and usually a religiously conservative, bent. They decide that those on the other end of the issue — library administrators, English teachers, writers — are amoral libertines who have set out to destroy children's innocence and warp their developing minds.
On the other side you find liberal folks who view any attempt to keep controversial reading materials from the sweaty paws of pubescents as an act of censorship by right-wing whack-jobs and fundamentalist know-nothings.
I arguably could be lumped into either group, I suppose.
I'm an evangelical minister who sent my son to a Christian school from kindergarten through the fifth grade. I tried throughout his childhood and early adolescence to keep tabs on what he read and watched.
But I'm also a writer who holds two degrees in English literature and another in a social science, all from a state university. On the First Amendment, I'm nearly an absolutist — so liberal I often consider the liberals reactionaries.
I believe consenting adults should be able to write, publish, read or surf almost any loony material they please (with the exceptions of child pornography and nuclear secrets), just as I believe they ought to be free to worship anything from the fire-spewing God of the Old Testament to pet rocks.
On the two recent censorship issues, then, I found myself, in the words of the biblical writer James, "a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways."
To wit: Minors, by definition, aren't consenting adults. We bar them from all kinds of activities we don't think they're mature enough to engage in. They can't vote, join the army, drive cars, buy cigarettes or drink liquor until they're, variously, 16, 18 or 21. Video stores and movie theaters keep under-age customers away every day from films rated R, NC-17 and X, without undue burden.
Why shouldn't libraries or schools restrict what children or teenagers read? Does any sane person think graphically sexual material is appropriate for an 11-year-old?
I don't agree with the tactics of the Jessamine County library employees who were fired. If you give credence to news reports, they allegedly broke the library's rules and took matters into their own hands. Still, I sympathize with their concerns.
Yet I'm also bewildered by parents who argue, as some in my county apparently have, that high school students aren't already dealing with troubled families, sex or suicidal thoughts, and that they should be kept from books that explore such subjects.
As our censorship issue raged, several local seventh-grade players were suspended from a basketball tournament for subjecting younger boys to simulated sexual assaults with a Gatorade bottle, and the school superintendent announced he's investigating reports that other middle-schoolers are electronically "sexting" nude pictures of themselves to friends. Lord knows what kids are dealing with by the time they reach high school.
I think it's bizarre that the Montgomery County teacher whose reading list was attacked seemed to get pilloried as a heathen corrupter of youth. I happen to be acquainted with Risha Mullins, although I don't know her well and haven't spoken with her about the book conflagration.
The irony is, she's a graduate of a Christian college, a Pentecostal who writes and sings gospel music, a conservative who voted for John McCain because she supports the right to bear arms. She's got more in common with Sarah Palin than with Lil' Kim.
But, as I said, once these controversies start, common sense flies off to Neptune.
Some issues aren't simply black and white. Reasonable people ought to be willing to sit down together, negotiate and reach rational solutions. Especially when their communities' children are involved.
