Creationist Ken Ham once stated, “There has been an incredible censorship in America and throughout the world, but particularly...where students aren’t even allowed to think critically…” Censorship is a mandate by the civil government which prohibits the publication, sale, and/or distribution of any material deemed unfit or politically harmful. In recent years, it seems to have been taken to an extreme.
Many books, often seen as records of the most defining moments in American history, have been banned from local libraries or entire states:
- Charles Dickens’ classic "Oliver Twist" was declared “anti-semitic.”
- William Shakespeare’s "King Lear" was condemned as “sexist.”
- Mark Twain’s "Tom Sawyer" was charged with “racism” and “sexism.”
- Mark Twain’s "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was banned in Colcord, MA in 1885 because it was “trash and suitable only for the slums.”
- "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald was challenged by the Baptist College of South Carolina in 1925 because of its language and reference to sexuality.
- "To Kill A Mockingbird", Harper Lee’s great American classic, was called a degrading, profane, and racist work that “promotes white supremacy.”
Oft times, the definition has been twisted for convenience:
- In 1986, Seattle, WA, school children are taught revisionist history with a historically inaccurate pamphlet, "Teaching about Thanksgiving", which told of “narrow-minded bigots” who survived only because of the Indians, but “turned on them when their help was no longer needed.”
- In 1994, a library board in Wellesley, Massachusetts, voted five to one to keep "Playboy" magazine on their shelves. The portion for keeping the magazine stated that it was “protected by free speech provisions” and therefore should not be disputed. Trustee Carol Gleason, who voted against the magazine, argued, “If minors cannot buy the magazine in the store, why should they be able to obtain it in the library?”
Local theatres began censoring films, commercials, and the like by barring them from using even the most indirect references to violence, race, sex, venereal disease, communism, divorce, abortion, and religion.
Charles Galloway said in a service at the Emory College in Georgia, “A nation ashamed of its ancestors will be despised by its prosperity.” As important historical events began to disappear from textbooks and others were tweaked to avoid offending civilians, history itself began to be questioned. Textbooks were unreliable squares of mud. It was impossible to see through the layer of censorship to the truth that lay just out of reach.
Has the idea of censorship been so far twisted it is now more crippling than protecting?
“Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.”
