Alabama Administrative Code › Title 520 - ALABAMA PUBLIC LIBRARY SERVICE › Chapter 520-3-1 - SERVICES TO STATE GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC LIBRARIES › Appendix B - The Freedom To Read

Current through Register Vol. 42, No. 9, June 28, 2024
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				no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the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
PEN American Center
People for the American Way
Periodical and Book Association of America
Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United
				States
Society of Professional Journalists
Women's National Book Association
The YWCA of the USA
Reprinted by permission from the American Library
				Association.
Author:
Nancy C. Pack, Director
Statutory Authority:
Code of Ala. 1975,
				  §§41-8-(1-10).