I’m a librarian and my new book IS THIS A CRY FOR HELP deals a lot with book bans, and the importance of intellectual freedom.
I’ve been visiting a few places around Canada to chat about it, including Calgary (which is in a province that is currently dealing a lot with this issue), and I’ve been recommending a great resource called uniteagainstbookbans.org
You’ll find more useful info there (including a toolkit) but here some highlights:
· Reading is a foundational skill, critical to learning and exercising our democratic freedoms.
· Individuals must be trusted and have the right to make their own decisions about what to read.
· Parents should not make decisions about what to read for other parents’ children.
· Library materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.
· Books are tools for understanding complex issues. Limiting access to books does not offer protection from life’s complex and challenging issues.
· All people deserve to see themselves reflected in a library’s books.
· Library workers should not be subject to harassment, intimidation, arrest, or threats of legal action for fulfilling their professional obligation to serve all members of their community.
· Free people can choose what they read but they cannot choose what the entire community reads.
· Censorship hurts democracy— how can we choose our leaders and laws if we don’t have free access to information?
· The movement to ban books is not a movement of parents, but a movement of partisans who seek to limit our freedom. (The VAST majority of demands to censor books come from organized political groups. They are rarely coming from people like actual concerned parents.)
· Assaults on our freedom to read are assaults on our personal liberty and democracy.
Free people read freely.
Go to uniteagainstbookbans.org for tools to help stop book bans.
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