From: kadie@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu (Carl M. Kadie)
Subject: Re: FOLLOW IDEA: Get K & Wal-Mart for book ban
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 17:01:57 GMT

[This statement gives the intellectual freedom reasons that books
shouldn't be suppressed by booksellers just because they are
controversial. It has been endorsed the American Booksellers
Association and many others (see the end of a list) - Carl]

                       THE FREEDOM TO READ


     The freedom to read is essential to our democracy.  It is
continuously under attack.  Private groups and public authorities
in various parts of the country are working to remove books from
sale, to censor textbooks, to label "controversial" books, to
distribute lists of "objectionable" books or authors, and to
purge libraries.  These actions apparently rise from a view that
our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid;
that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the
subversion of politics and the corruption of morals.  We, as
citizens devoted to the use of books and as librarians and
publishers responsible for disseminating them, wish to assert the
public interest in the preservation of the freedom to read.
     We are deeply concerned about these attempts at suppression.
Most such attempts rest on a denial of the fundamental premise of
democracy:  that the ordinary citizen, by exercising critical
judgment, will accept the good and reject the bad.  The censors,
public and private, assume that they should determine what is
good and what is bad for their fellow-citizens.
     We trust Americans to recognize propaganda, and to reject
it.  We do not believe they need the help of censors to assist
them in this task.  We do not believe they are prepared to
sacrifice their heritage of a free press in order to be
"protected" against what others think may be bad for them.  We
believe they still favor free enterprise in ideas and expression.
     We are aware, of course, that books are not alone in being
subjected to efforts at suppression.  We are aware that these
efforts are related to a larger pattern of pressures being
brought against education, the press, films, radio and
television.  The problem is not only one of actual censorship.
The shadow of fear cast by these pressures leads, we suspect, to
an even larger voluntary curtailment of expression by those who
seek to avoid controversy.
     Such pressure toward conformity is perhaps natural to a time
of uneasy change and pervading fear.  Especially when so many of
our apprehensions are directed against an ideology, the
expression of a dissident idea becomes a thing feared in itself,
and we tend to move against it as against a hostile deed, with
suppression.
     And yet suppression is never more dangerous than in such a
time of social tension.  Freedom has given the United States the
elasticity to endure strain.  Freedom keeps open the path of
novel and creative solutions, and enables change to come by
choice.  Every silencing of a heresy, every enforcement of an
orthodoxy, diminishes the toughness and resilience of our society
and leaves it the less able to deal with stress.
     Now as always in our history, books are among our greatest
instruments of freedom.  They are almost the only means for
making generally available ideas or manners of expression that
can initially command only a small audience.  They are the
natural medium for the new idea and the untried voice from which
come the original contributions to social growth.  They are
essential to the extended discussion which serious thought
requires, and to the accumulation of knowledge and ideas into
organized collections.
     We believe that free communication is essential to the
preservation of a free society and a creative culture.  We
believe that these pressures towards conformity present the
danger of limiting the range and variety of inquiry and
expression on which our democracy and our culture depend.  We
believe that every American community must jealously guard the
freedom to publish and to circulate, in order to preserve its own
freedom to read.  We believe that publishers and librarians have
a profound responsibility to give validity to that freedom to
read by making it possible for the readers to choose freely from
a variety of offerings.
     The freedom to read is guaranteed by the Constitution.
Those with faith in free people will stand firm on these
constitutional guarantees of essential rights and will exercise
the responsibilities that accompany these rights.
     We therefore affirm these propositions:
     1.  It is in the public interest for publishers and
librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and
expressions, including those which are unorthodox or unpopular
with the majority.
     Creative thought is by definition new, and what is new is
different.  The bearer of every new thought is a rebel until that
idea is refined and tested.  Totalitarian systems attempt to
maintain themselves in power by the ruthless suppression of any
concept which challenges the established orthodoxy.  The power of
a democratic system to adapt to change is vastly strengthened by
the freedom of its citizens to choose widely from among
conflicting opinions offered freely to them.  To stifle every
nonconformist idea at birth would mark the end of the democratic
process.  Furthermore, only through the constant activity of
weighing and selecting can the democratic mind attain the
strength demanded by times like these.  We need to know not only
what we believe but why we believe it.
     2.  Publishers, librarians and booksellers do not need to
endorse every idea or presentation contained in the books they
make available.  It would conflict with the public interest for
them to establish their own political, moral or aesthetic views
as a standard for determining what books should be published or
circulated.
     Publishers and librarians serve the educational process by
helping to make available knowledge and ideas required for the
growth of the mind and the increase of learning.  They do not
foster education by imposing as mentors the patterns of their own
thought.  The people should have the freedom to read and consider
a broader range of ideas than those that may be held by any
single librarian or publisher or government or church.  It is
wrong that what one can read should be confined to what another
thinks proper.
     3.  It is contrary to the public interest for publishers or
librarians to determine the acceptability of a book on the basis
of the personal history or political affiliations of the author.
     A book should be judged as a book.  No art or literature can
flourish if it is to be measured by the political views or
private lives of its creators.  No society of free people can
flourish which draws up lists of writers to whom it will not
listen, whatever they may have to say.
     4.  There is no place in our society for efforts to coerce
the taste of others, to confine adults to the reading matter
deemed suitable for adolescents, or to inhibit the efforts of
writers to achieve artistic expression.
     To some, much of modern literature is shocking.  But is not
much of life itself shocking?  We cut off literature at the
source if we prevent writers from dealing with the stuff of life.
Parents and teachers have a responsibility to prepare the young
to meet the diversity of experiences in life to which they will
be exposed, as they have a responsibility to help them learn to
think critically for themselves.  These are affirmative
responsibilities, not to be discharged simply by preventing them
from reading works for which they are not yet prepared.  In these
matters taste differs, and taste cannot be legislated; nor can
machinery be devised which will suit the demands of one group
without limiting the freedom of others.
     5.  It is not in the public interest to force a reader to
accept with any book the prejudgment of a label characterizing
the book or author as subversive or dangerous.
     The ideal of labeling presupposes the existence of
individuals or groups with wisdom to determine by authority what
is good or bad for the citizen.  It presupposes that individuals
must be directed in making up their minds about the ideas they
examine.  But Americans do not need others to do their thinking
for them.
     6.  It is the responsibility of publishers and librarians,
as guardians of the people's freedom to read, to contest
encroachments upon that freedom by individuals or groups seeking
to impose their own standards or tastes upon the community at
large.
     It is inevitable in the give and take of the democratic
process that the political, the moral, or the aesthetic concepts
of an individual or group will occasionally collide with those of
another individual or group.  In a free society individuals are
free to determine for themselves what they wish to read, and each
group is free to determine what it will recommend to its freely
associated members.  But no group has the right to take the law
into its own hands, and to impose its own concept of politics or
morality upon other members of a democratic society.  Freedom is
no freedom if it is accorded only to the accepted and the
inoffensive.
     7.  It is the responsibility of publishers and librarians to
give full meaning to the freedom to read by providing books that
enrich the quality and diversity of thought and expression.  By
the exercise of this affirmative responsibility, they can
demonstrate that the answer to a bad book is a good one, the
answer to a bad idea is a good one.
     The freedom to read is of little consequence when expended
on the trivial; it is frustrated when the reader cannot obtain
matter fit for that reader's purpose.  What is needed is not only
the absence of restraint, but the positive provision of
opportunity for the people to read the best that has been thought
and said.  Books are the major channel by which the intellectual
inheritance is handed down, and the principal means of its
testing and growth.  The defense of their freedom and integrity,
and the enlargement of their service to society, requires of all
publishers and librarians the utmost of their faculties, and
deserves of all citizens the fullest of their support.
     We state these propositions neither lightly nor as easy
generalizations.  We here stake out a lofty claim for the value
of books.  We do so because we believe that they are good,
possessed of enormous variety and usefulness, worthy of
cherishing and keeping free.  We realize that the application of
these propositions may mean the dissemination of ideas and
manners of expression that are repugnant to many persons.  We do
not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what
people read is unimportant.  We believe rather that what people
read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that
the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society.
Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.
___________________________
This statement was originally issued in May of 1953 by the
Westchester Conference of the American Library Association and
the American Book Publishers Council, which in 1970 consolidated
with the American Educational Publishers Institute to become the
Association of American Publishers.

Adopted June 25, 1953; revised January 28, 1972, January 16,
1991, by the ALA Council and the AAP Freedom to Read Committee.


A Joint Statement by:

American Library Association
Association of American Publishers

Subsequently Endorsed by:

American Booksellers Association
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression
American Civil Liberties Union
American Federation of Teachers AFL-CIO
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith
Association of American University Presses
Children's Book Council
Freedom to Read Foundation
International Reading Association
Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression
National Association of College Stores
National Council of Teachers of English
P.E.N. - American Center
People for the American Way
Periodical and Book Association of America
Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S.
Society of Professional Journalists
Women's National Book Association
YWCA of the U.S.A.

[Made available by permission of the American Library Association.]
--
Carl Kadie -- kadie@cs.uiuc.edu -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Newsgroups: soc.motss