A prominent pro-family group says "Banned Books Week," going on now, is intended to intimidate parents.
The week-long observance is sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA), which says the purpose is to protest censorship and celebrate open access to viewpoints that not everyone agrees with. "Intellectual freedom -- the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular -- provides the foundation for Banned Books Week," says the ALA website. But Candy Cushman of Focus on the Family points out to OneNewsNow that there has been no push for censorship against libraries. "For example, the American Library Association itself admits that only 74 books were actually removed in 2008," Cushman notes. "And when you consider that there are some 82,000 public school libraries, not to mention all the thousands of community libraries, that hardly amounts to a national book-banning crisis, does it?" So if there is no book banning of consequence, what is the purpose of what Cushman describes as a "trumped-up event"? The education analyst feels it is to undermine the role of parents in the education process and silence those who are concerned about such things as sexually explicit and pro-homosexual literature in a school setting. "Parents have a right and a responsibility to have a say in what their kids are exposed to in school -- and this is what this is really about," she summarizes. The ALA has as one of its policies to provide material that offers differing views -- yet students in Virginia were denied when they tried to convince library officials to offer material demonstrating that homosexuals can leave that lifestyle.
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