New Freedom Inflames Old Battles

We've been here before! Remember, it is the same old struggle, no matter how many times they tell you it is "different" or "worse" today. In truth, it is better now. They have always tried to limit expression, especially when it involved politics, sex, religion, and children. Over the centuries, they have blamed everyone and everything they fear: Satan, "infidels," "godless Communists." Those who would limit free expression have always tried to expand the restrictions from children to everyone. Libraries have been censored and sacked by kings and emperors, priests and preachers, rabbis and ayatollahs, commissioners and commissars, Republicans and Democrats.

The good news is that the censors are losing, and they always lose. Human history is the story of people achieving ever-greater freedom of expression. Librarians and libraries have always been part of that movement.

True believers always begin by telling us of impending "danger." They warn us that things are much worse now and that is why we need their "protection" from blasphemy, sexual acts and proclivities, revolution, and other forms of expression that offend them.

They always try to scare us, explaining how free expression will corrupt our children. They always move from that to "protecting" adults.

These age-old tactics have never won a permanent victory. What shocked people and was, thus, easily censored in each earlier age became commonplace. For example, RKO banned the use of the words dame, wench, broad, and fanny from its movies in 1933.

They are partly right when they say the Internet is different, because it does provide more access to more potentially offensive material. Remember that the same has been true of every innovative technology and medium from movable type to satellites. After photography brought a heightened realism to illustration, movies gave it life. Then new broadcast media gave it reach, the means to cover the world.

Every fresh medium, including the Internet, has made all expression easier to access. All the ideas the true believer wants to restrict are among the first to appear in the latest technologies and media. Every time we achieve another freedom, the struggle begins anew. We have been here before!

What censors really fear is the march of human freedom as it destroys their ability to control expression. That's why an automatic control, like an electronic filter, hiding what is censored, is so attractive.

Remember all that when they attack your library.

Remember the parade of free expression. Remember that it was much worse during the Spanish Inquisition, under Cotton Mather and the Puritans, under Hitler and Stalin. It was much worse when Joe McCarthy was raiding U.S. government libraries and before "Banned in Boston" changed from a reality to a useful marketing slogan.

When the next true believer comes along with "research" to show how much greater the current danger has become, how it is hurting your kids, stand your ground. Don't buy into it! Things were much worse for all people including kids before freedom, when they could lock up your library, muzzle your voice, burn your books, indoctrinate your offspring, and send you off to jail.

Don't cave in, but don't be ashamed of a political compromise in order to stay afloat. Take heart in the knowledge that we have won these battles before, and we will win them again. The march of freedom will go on in the same direction. The current phase of the struggle will soon be over.

In less than a generation the "danger" of access to the Internet will seem as quaint and laughable as the "dangers" they cited when they wanted to curb jazz and rock'n'roll, D.H. Lawrence, comic books, Catcher in the Rye, or Daddy's Roommate.

Librarians are an integral part of the historic expansion of freedom. We should be proud of that. When the most jarring free expression frightens our neighbors, we must reassure them. We must remind them of how much worse it was before we won that freedom and how much better things are now.