Our “Freedom to Read”

Encouraging reading is a good idea 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. The Weekly News champions “Find Your Freedom to Read During Banned Books Week 2020!” That is the theme of this year’s Banned Books Week, celebrated across the country Sept. 27-Oct. 3.

Actually, reading everything is celebrated and book banning is exposed during this annual week organized by the American Library Association in coalition with others.

All times are good times to read.

There is never a good time or a good reason to publicly ban books – or any material, in any media – from anyone, not even your most precious child.

Parents have the right to choose, and keep, books from their children in their home, but no concerned parent or citizen can impose their worries – or standards – on the larger community.

Children are our most precious possession, but ideas – as printed words, electronic media or any art form – have precious lives too.

We do not have to understand or agree with the words on a page, or art, however presented.

We do have to give it space to live and to be reflected upon by anyone willing to take the chance and the challenge to grow.

In the public sphere we have to leave it in the eye and mind of the beholder to decide if they want to make ideas a part of her life, or not. Everyone has the freedom to choose to ignore any idea or words they find distasteful or repugnant. But no one has the right to ban books or media or art from community spaces.

Our society places individual freedom as a value on the highest pedestal. Liberty is shouted for with equal fervor. Unfortunately, a faction of the population, insisting on their freedom and liberty, then seek to impose their version, believing their values are the freedom and liberty that the entire country must embrace.

That position is a dead end, at odds with their country’s Constitution. No one, having found their freedom, can make it official, the gold standard of liberty with which the rest of us must fall in. Any liberty limited by boundary defining parameters is a self-imposed reduction on exploration of ideas and values and a barrier for others when the restriction is pushed into the public sphere of a library or school district.

Libraries’ freedom to offer any book is implicit in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech … “

The very next phrase “or of the press” is why newspapers are champions against the scourge of censorship.

Here is the entire First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This year the La Conner library is not open to display banned books and engage with patrons to encourage the freedom to read. All libraries in Skagit County are closed, a victim of the coronavirus pandemic and Skagit County’s residents’ inability to reduce the spread of COVID-19. La Conner’s little library is off limits, but social distancing in that small space is difficult in the best of circumstances. Thankfully, a new library will soon be built, though it probably will not be open in time to celebrate 2021’s Banned Books Week.

When the new library does open, there will be celebrating in the streets no matter what week it is.