Bonfire for the Humanities?

A guest post by Mark Y. Herring

Photo by Georgiana Pop (Avram) on Unsplash

Recent library book scandals have many librarians in a moment of self-flagellation, not to mention fear of conflagrations, a bonfire for the humanities, since most challenges—but not all—have been fiction materials. Librarians have taken heat over the last year and one can hardly blame them for being a little skittish.  Challenges to materials are particularly sensitive, and one should approach them with caution and foresight.

Unfortunately, latterly, challenges the content of a book for a certain audience (even minors), and elicits a chorus (Greek-like) in a cacophony of First Amendment violations and book-banning/burning intent. As an academic librarian for 42 years, now retired, many of my colleagues often argued an absolutist view of the First Amendment, and that ‘absolute’ absolutely extended to include children and young people. In effect, they argued that no one has the right to exclude any materials from anyone. In the case of libraries, this meant that tax dollars would buy materials that some taxpayers would find reprehensible, a saw that cut both ideological ways.

This assessment of the First Amendment includes not only many librarians but also many moderate-minded individuals, unaware of the recent radicalization of librarianship. But this misapprehension of the First Amendment (for example, you cannot shout fire in a crowded theatre when there isn’t one; you cannot libel; you cannot slander) is largely owing to misinformation about what is being restricted from libraries for minors. See below.

The South Carolina Legislature just passed a change to Proviso 27.1, Aid to Counties Libraries Allotment. The change requires public libraries to “certify to the State library that their county libraries do not offer any materials that appeal to the prurient interest of children under the age of seventeen [my emphasis] without explicit parental consent. Prurient is defined as “shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion and is reflective of lewd and lascivious desires and thoughts.”  Queue the Greek Chorus.

The first to weigh in is the South Carolina State Library in a June 13 Press Release. I serve on the State Library Board with its director and applauded her announced departure from the American Library Association earlier this year. Her letter was forceful, and she gave the board advance notice before sending it. (That courtesy did not extend to the June 13 press release. The director did apologize after I pointed out the omission.)  The June 13 press release, with which I strongly disagree, is a volte-face, an about-face, and the complaints are that this proviso is “impossible” to enforce. Challenging to be sure, but impossible? Is this Supreme Court Justice Potter déjà vu all over again: I cannot define obscenity but know it when I see it? Have we reached a point, as Livy had it, where we can no longer tolerate our vices or their cure?

According to the State Library press release, local libraries have complete control via the so-called home rule. Ostensibly, this means these libraries could if they chose to do so choose materials with prurient interests if they are titillated to do so. Taxpayers must grin and bear it, or just bear it.  At the close of the State Library’s press release, the argument is that these changes in Proviso 27.1 are “vague, subjective, and outside the scope of the governing legislation related to the Duties of the State Library in executing library policy (SC Code 60-1-60 (2023).”  Does this mean that the State Library is refusing to do the will of the legislature? If so, this is tenuous ground, frankly. A better approach, to my mind, would have been to admit to the difficulty of the enforcement—and of course, it would not be easy--but added a promise to do the will of the legislature.  Other laws may obtain, but a legislative proviso passed by both houses would have an overriding effect, would it not?

In Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead, Irving Kristol once famously wrote, “If you care about the quality of life in our American Democracy, then you have to be for censorship.”  What Kristol means is that if we want a culture we can admire and recommend, we are going to have to resist our baser natures at every turn. We must strive to do so.  Cicero wrote of a similar difficulty.  He warned, “If we are forced, at every hour, to watch or listen to horrible events, this constant stream of ghastly impressions will deprive even the most delicate among us of all respect for humanity.”  When I walk down a mall court and hear even the youngest there swearing like a rap singer, that respect appears to be lost, and we are already moving in that horror-shuddering direction.

John Adams put an even finer point on it when he argued that “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  And that may be the proverbial rub: if we are no longer a moral and religious people, is our constitution null and void?  Is it hyperbolic to argue that by refusing to restrict underage materials that outrageously offend the conscience is to hasten the demise of this constitutional republic?  I think not.

When it comes to reading materials for children and young people, we have lost our collective minds if we do not care responsibly about what they are reading. Some states are waking up to this seminal understanding, and the Palmetto State is not alone. Other states are also looking to establish guardrails to the collection and acquisition of library materials for minors. Sadly, this has become necessary owing to the aforementioned radicalization of the profession.

I do understand the fear.  Any talk of restricting materials gets a kind of RICO-like survey: if it’s one, it’s all of them. Let me hasten to point out that no one in this state or any other state wants to ban any book. No one is seeking to remove To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tale of Two Cities, or The Adventures of Huck Finn from any library, for example. What my state and others are seeking to do is provide the right kind of reading materials for the right ages. In the same way, we do not teach calculus to third graders—not because we don’t want them to know it but because they cannot comprehend it-- we shouldn’t be proffering prurient materials to the underaged, especially at taxpayers’ expense. Adults can of course read whatever they wish.  Children and young people need guidance until they are ready to make their own informed decisions.

But are books targeted by the changes in Proviso 27.1 really that bad?  Isn’t this just hysteria from the rightwing? I urge readers to surf over to booklooks.org and look up This Book is Gay, Some Girls Do, or Some Girls Bind, or any of the scores of books that the site rates as threes, fours, or fives. As for those who think prurient is too difficult to grasp, a pons asinorum as it were, look at the rubric for these materials on the same site (https://booklooks.org/ratings-system). Prurient is spelled out in the rubric very carefully and responsibly. Enforcement will be difficult but I do not think impossible.

I urge surfing to that site because this is a family site and to quote books riddled with fellatio, cunnilingus, f-bombs, and c-words to describe women, would scandalize many readers unnecessarily. The change to Proviso 27.1 is needed, not because these books are ubiquitous in South Carolina, or even nationwide (though I suspect in places like San Franciso, Chicago, and New York they likely are). It is needed because the American Library Association and library schools have so radicalized the profession in recent years that libraries have, sadly, lost the trust of many of their constituents. The change to Proviso 27.1 is a preventative medicine.

But what if a parent wants certain prurient books for themselves or their children?  Such people may remind one of Samuel Johnson and his Scottish friend who did not think there was a distinction between virtue and vice. If true, said Johnson, “when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.”  We cannot mock virtue and wonder why we have profligates in our midst. There is nothing in any charge or regulation that requires any library to satisfy the needs of all its patrons, and indeed libraries never have (budgets create the most restrictions). The simplest solution is to say that if one wants certain questionable materials so badly, let him or her pay for it out of their wallet. Let’s use the taxpayer funds from the overtaxed populace to support the common good, and I think that is something everyone can agree on, especially when thinking about minors.

If we do not end this radicalization of libraries, the public supporting them will (rightly to my mind) disappear. To redeem their trust, librarians should stand up against this flotsam and jetsam and shout “Stop.”  Arguing against the change in Proviso 27.1  is not only disappointing coming as it does from the state’s highest-ranking library, but it will also ensure a future even more bleak and depressing than our present cultural condition already is. 

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