On This One Summer’s Key Position In A Minnesota-Based Battle Over Free Speech Issues

Alison Flood at The Guardian has a nice write-up on the crucial position held by the book The One Summer in a free speech battle caused by its banning from a K-12 school library in Minnesota.

I am so disconnected from this kind of fight and feel like history has already so very much overwhelmed the issues involved that I'm sort of baffled they still get argued, let along argued the way they are here. We're far past the point where there is any gateway function played by a school library, and so past the point where a parallel prurient interest might be served by a book in a library. I think libraries should hold everything for which positive value can be argued, and this is a certainly a book that has positive values. The rest of it seems 1978: kids aren't going to be checking this book for a thrill, and unless they're perpetually treated like the kind of morons that need material hidden from them aren't going to process it in some out-of-step way.

To put it another way, I am not frightened for one millisecond by the prospect of a young person built in the worst way one could possibly project from exposure to the ideas of This One Summer, and I don't like young people as a general rule.
 
posted 2:55 am PST | Permalink
 

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