It bothers me that the year is now 2012 and book-banning is still a topic of conversation. Shouldn’t we, as a society, have moved past this by now? We have not. And as long as we have individual thinkers, censorship will exist. There will never be a time when everyone agrees on everything.
For most people the term “book banning” causes a knee-jerk reaction of outrage. And it should. But maybe the term is over-used. “Censorship” is probably more accurate. To my knowledge, there’s no big government agency out there insisting that all copies of an “offensive” book be destroyed and that no one is allowed to read it. Most of the reports of book banning are in regards to schools across the country. Parents and/or school boards find something inappropriate for the kids under their protection, and they insist on having it removed from the curriculum and/or the school library. (more…)