Library Fight Riles Up City, Leads to Book-burning Demand
By Jason Hanna | CNN

A fight over books depicting sex and homosexuality has riled up a small Wisconsin city, cost some library board members their positions and prompted a call for a public book burning.

The battle has stirred much of West Bend, a city of roughly 30,000 people about 35 miles north of Milwaukee. Residents have sparred for months on blogs, airwaves and at meetings, including one where a man told the city’s library director he should be tarred and feathered.

The row even spread to this year’s Fourth of July parade, which included a float featuring a washing machine and a sign that read “keep our library clean.”

“If you told me we would be going through a book challenge of this nature, I’d think, ‘Never in a million years,’ ” said Michael Tyree, director of the West Bend Community Memorial Library.

The strife began in February when West Bend couple Jim and Ginny Maziarka objected to some of the content in the city library’s young-adult section. They later petitioned the library board to move any sexually explicit books — the definition of which would be debated — from the young-adult section to the adult section and to label them as sexually explicit.

Ginny Maziarka, 49, said the books in the section of the library aimed at children aged 12 to 18 included homosexual and heterosexual content she thought was inappropriate for youths.

She and her husband also asked the library to obtain books about homosexuality that affirmed heterosexuality, such as titles written by “ex-gays,” Maziarka said.

“All the books in the young-adult zone that deal with homosexuality are gay-affirming. That’s not balance,” she said.

The library did not agree with the Maziarkas’ suggestions, and the couple appealed to the library board. Ginny Maziarka, a mother of four, began blogging about the issue and the local newspaper picked up the dispute, sparking the opposition.

Maria Hanrahan, also a West Bend mom, set up a rival blog to argue the other side.

“I’m against any other party telling me what’s appropriate for my child and what isn’t,” said Hanrahan, 40, who also created a West Bend Parents for Free Speech group. “We don’t mean to say these are appropriate for everyone, but we don’t feel they should be set apart from other materials or restricted from the young-adult section.”

By this time, many more people had become caught up in the issue, which was generating heat. When Hanrahan appeared on a local radio, callers attacked her views, she said.

“People were being very passionate on both sides of the issue. I think it divided the community a little bit,” she said.

With the debate raging, the city council voted in April against renewing the terms of four library board members, in part because council members thought the board was dragging its feet, library director Tyree said.

The Maziarkas were still fighting to have books moved, having identified 82 questionable titles — more than double their original list. Then they stopped targeting a list of books and circulated a petition that asked the board to label and move to the adult section any “youth-targeted pornographic books” — including books that describe sex acts in a way unsuitable for minors. The books could still be checked out freely by anyone.

“We’re not talking about educational material. We’re talking raunchy sex acts,” Maziarka said.

One book she objects to is “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” in which a fictional teenage boy tells about his freshman year in high school, including rape and homosexual and heterosexual sex between teens.

Tyree said book excerpts found on Maziarka’s blog had been taken out of context and, in the case of “Wallflower,” the criticism missed some of the book’s points.

“In this book, there were consequences of … rape, of indiscriminate sex. Those were not portrayed so glowingly,” he said.

By the time the library board met on June 2, each side had collected more than 1,000 signatures backing their position. Dozens of residents spoke at the meeting before the board — still including the outgoing members — unanimously voted to keep all policies the same.

The demand to move the books was always going to be problematic because no authority has determined that any of the titles are pornographic or obscene, Tyree said.

Book challenges aren’t new. More than 500 were reported in the United States in 2008, mostly in schools and public libraries, Deborah Caldwell-Stone of the American Library Association said.

But this one was attracting extra attention. Caldwell-Stone, who monitored the dispute, said moving any young-adult book to the adult section would have been a form of censorship, even if teens were free to check them out.

“The whole intent was shelving books not on the basis of age or reading ability, but because they disapprove of the content with the intent of restricting access. That’s a burden on First Amendment rights,” Caldwell-Stone said.

Outside West Bend, the fight caught the attention of Robert Braun, who, with three other Milwaukee-area men, filed a claim against West Bend calling for one of the library’s books to be publicly burned, along with financial damages.

The four plaintiffs — who describe themselves as “elderly” in their complaint — claim their “mental and emotional well-being was damaged by [the] book at the library.”

The claim, unconnected to the Maziarkas, says the book “Baby Be-bop” — a fictional piece about a homosexual teenager — is “explicitly vulgar, racial and anti-Christian.”

Braun, who says he is president of a Milwaukee group called the Christian Civil Liberties Union, said he singled out the book because it “goes way over the line” with offensive language and descriptions of sex acts.

The call for burning the book showed his passion, Braun, 74, said. “I don’t sit on the fence when I do these things. When I make a decision to speak up on something, I go for it.”

The ALA will help the library oppose the claim if it goes forward, Caldwell-Stone said, adding she felt that was unlikely because “it has very little basis in law.”

Back in West Bend, the Maziarkas and their supporters are gearing up for another go at the library, in part because the board now has its four new members. They do not want books burned, but they do want action.

“We want parents to decide whether they want their children to have access to these books … and we want the library’s help in identifying [them through labeling and moving],” Maziarka said. “It’s just common sense.”

The Day Obscenity Became Art
By FRED KAPLAN
New York Times | July 20, 2009

TODAY is the 50th anniversary of the court ruling that overturned America’s obscenity laws, setting off an explosion of free speech — and also, in retrospect, splashing cold water on the idea, much discussed during Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, that judges are “umpires” rather than agents of social change.

The historic case began on May 15, 1959, when Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press, sued the Post Office for confiscating copies of the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which had long been banned for its graphic sex scenes.

Most lawyers of the time would have advised Mr. Rosset that he had a weak case. Back in 1873, Anthony Comstock, the former postal inspector who founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had persuaded Congress to pass a law outlawing obscenity, which state and federal courts came to define over the decades as works that “community standards” would regard as “lustful,” “lewd,” “lascivious” or “prurient.”

As recently as 1957, the Supreme Court had ruled in Roth v. United States — a case involving a bookseller who sent erotic literature through the mail — that the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech did not apply to obscenity. The case against “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” seemed cut and dry; whatever the book’s literary merits, it met the legal definition of obscenity.

However, Mr. Rosset hired a lawyer named Charles Rembar, whom he’d met playing tennis in the Hamptons. Rembar had never argued a case in court but was an adviser to several writers, including his cousin Norman Mailer. (When Mailer wrote “The Naked and the Dead,” his career-sparking World War II novel, Rembar advised him to avoid legal controversy by spelling his characters’ most common utterance “fug.” The trick worked.)

Looking over the Roth decision, Rembar spotted a loophole. The opinion, written by Justice William J. Brennan, noted that the First Amendment’s purpose was “to assure unfettered interchange of ideas” and that “all ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance — unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion — have the full protection of the guarantees.” But, Brennan went on, “implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.”

Rembar mulled over a question that Brennan apparently hadn’t considered: What if a book met the standards of obscenity yet also presented ideas of “redeeming social importance”? By Brennan’s logic, wouldn’t it qualify for the First Amendment’s protection after all?

On a sheet of paper, Rembar drew two slightly overlapping circles. He labeled one circle “Material appealing to prurient interests.” He labeled the other “Material utterly without social importance.” By Brennan’s reasoning, only material that fell inside both circles — that was both prurient and worthless — should be denied the privileges of free speech.

This was the argument that Rembar made before Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. With the assistance of several literary critics’ testimony, he presented “Lady Chatterley” as a novel of ideas that inveighed against sex without love, the mechanization of industrial life and morbid hypocrisy.

The United States attorney representing the Post Office, S. Hazard Gillespie Jr., thought Rembar had misread the law, and he recited a clause of the Roth ruling that Rembar had omitted. Justice Brennan had written that controversial ideas “have the full protection” of the First Amendment — “unless,” Gillespie underlined, these ideas were “excludable because they encroach upon the limited area of more important interests.” One of those interests, surely, was keeping obscenity under wraps. Hence Rembar’s argument was irrelevant.

This was, however, just the rebuttal Rembar was hoping for. He pointed out a footnote in which Brennan elaborated on what kind of “more important interests” were “excludable.” All of them involved actions — peddling, picketing, parading without a license, playing loud music from a truck. The First Amendment didn’t protect any of that. But none of Brennan’s examples involved writing — expression unattached to conduct. Pure expression could be forbidden, Rembar argued, only if it was “utterly without social importance.”

On July 21, 1959, Judge Bryan ruled in favor of Grove Press and ordered the Post Office to lift all restrictions on sending copies of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” through the mail. This, in effect, marked the end of the Post Office’s authority — which, until then, it held absolutely — to declare a work of literature “obscene” or to impound copies of those works or prosecute their publishers. This wasn’t exactly the end of obscenity as a criminal category. Into the mid-1960s, Barney Rosset would wage battles in various state courts over William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” other Grove novels now widely regarded as classics. But the “Chatterley” case established the principle that allowed free speech its total victory.

The Post Office did appeal Judge Bryan’s verdict; a panel of four judges upheld it unanimously. The government’s lawyers decided not to appeal further to the Supreme Court. They knew that they would lose — that the justices who, just two years earlier, had excluded this sort of literature from constitutional protection would now change their minds. They knew that Rembar’s creative view of Justice Brennan’s opinion — a view that Brennan had not explicitly considered when he wrote it — was logically unassailable.

The case also made clear that laws are more complex than strike zones or foul lines, which is why the analogy between judges and umpires is so misleading.

The distinction is sharpened by another argument Rembar made during the “Lady Chatterley” trial. “A novel, no matter how much devoted to the act of sex,” he said, “can hardly add to the constant sexual prodding with which our environment assails us.” In the mass media of the day, with its appeals to a booming youth market, movies and advertisements were often “calculated to produce sexual thoughts and reactions,” to the point where “we live in a sea of sexual provocation.”

In short, “community standards” were radically changing. The proof was that, after the ban on “Lady Chatterley” was lifted, the book reached the No. 2 slot on The New York Times best-seller list (topped only by Leon Uris’s “Exodus”) and, within a year, sold two million copies.

For many decades, the courts upheld racial segregation; then, suddenly, they didn’t. For many decades, the courts let the Post Office decide which books people could read; then, suddenly, they didn’t. In both cases, and many others that could be cited, the laws hadn’t changed; society did. And the courts responded accordingly.

EDGE | Kilian Melloy
Tuesday Jul 7, 2009

Following an article about GLBT books being stricken from a summer reading list in Washington, D.C., the capitol city’s school district seemingly reversed itself and restored a number of gay-themed books to the list.

The School Library Journal reported in a June 21 article that, according to a post made by a librarian at a gay and lesbian listserve, the school district had asked for a listing of books with GLBT themes.

Upon receiving the list, the books that had been named were dropped from the reading list, the post said.

The listserve, which belongs to the American Library Association, included a posting from the DC Public Library’s Jeanne Lauber, the article said.

The article quoted Lauber as having written, “The DC Public Schools decided to scrub their summer reading list of all GLTB related books. This seems outrageous.

“We’re thinking that if a parent writes a strong letter, it’ll be the most effective. I’m thinking it should go to the mainstream press, and perhaps someone in the school system too,” the posting went on.

Added the posting, “Apparently the public library system told the schools which books were GLTB (not knowing why they were being asked) and the schools removed them.”

But a July 2 follow-up article in the same publication reported that nine GLBT titles had been restored to the summer reading list.

Among them was the #1 challenged book in America’s school libraries for three years running, “And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, iullustrated by Henry Cole.

“And Tango Makes Three” is based on the true story of how two male penguins who had nested together were given an egg to tend, and proceeded to hatch and raise their adopted chick, Tango.

Challenged books are titles that are the subjects of formal requests for de-accessioning. Such challenges are tracked by the American Library Association, which publishes a list of challenged books every year.

The Association’s deputy director, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, commented on this year’s list, topped once again by “And Tango Makes Three,” saying, “Books that address same-sex parenting, or same-sex relationships, are particularly prone to challenges in the U.S.”

Added Caldwell-Stone, “In the case of ’And Tango Makes Three,’ there are many parents who believe it inappropriate to teach children anything at all about homosexual relationships, even in the form of a picture book about a true story.”

The School Library Journal article of July 2 reported that the District’s Public Library and its school district both denied any knowledge of these subtractions and additions to the summer reading list.

The article reported that it is not typically the case that the summer reading list would be released after the commencement of the summer break, and cited school district spokesperson Jennifer Calloway as explaining that this year’s list required additional time for final approval of all titles included.

Said Calloway, “All of the LGBTQ books reviewed are on the final list.”

The article said that other GLBT-themed books on the list are Todd Parr’s “The Family Book,” along with “Totally Joe,” by James Howe, “Luna,” by Julie Anne Peters, and “Some Day This Pain Will Be Useful to You,” by Peter Cameron.