In our estimation, there is no more definitive example of prejudicial depravity than the product of the toxic admixture of ignorance, arrogance, and moral asininity displayed by the semi-literate charlatans arrogating to themselves the constabulary responsibility of guardians of the human (read, other people’s) thoughts. This neurotic, quasi-religious, literary evangelism is as unAmerican as it is presumptuously tyrannical. The anti-intellectual, societal pox of book burning and censorship is an inarguable demonstration of unjustifiable and unfounded, determinations of acceptability, founded on a delusional responsibility to protect society from evil influence. The practice, in addition to its plain arrogance, is in reality, hand-in-hand with detestable bigotry;
As we follow the media-reported examples of such contextual delusion, the same empirically seem to apply to books containing, the subjects of sexuality, gender, and race, or concerning the dark periods of America’s history. The inane Quixotic conception seems to be that if such “immoral” and “improper,” matters were scrupulously deleted from the Nation’s literature, they would be protectively erased from history and the reader’s ( morally justified) remorse. However, to the contrary, legitimate and realistic aspirations toward humanistic tolerance and equity may indeed benefit from the instructional examples of the “dark periods ” in American history, as enduring lessons of more appropriate morality and beneficial exercise of humanism. Deleting them from books does not erase their past reality and may render academic, the teaching of human equity, and the American ideal of “E Pluribus Unum.” Banning books on sex, gender, and homosexuality, may conceivably, be more indicative of the neurotic persona of the dedicated censor than any purported determination of human rectitude.
In addition to the analogous practice of an ostrich, burying his head in the sand, book censorship is an egregious violation of the Constitutional assurance of free speech and expression and a violation of American liberty’s implicit franchise of enlightenment. With apologies for the repetition, the perverse and autocratic practice of semi-literate charlatans have arrogated to themselves the bizarre, delusional ideation of personal authority and mandatory duty to audit human thought and its expression, to test permissible accordance with their reductively skewed mindset. It may notably be presumed that a contemplative, regular reader would possess the requisite sensitivity and personal awareness to observe that the arrogated duty and rectitude to police people’s minds constitutes a presumptuous, quixotic, and thoroughly irrational aspiration.
As evidenced by anecdotal history, the self-anointed inquisitors of virtue have, all too often, been the moral offenders, including such famous malefactors as Eugene McCarthy, Father Coughlin, and Huey Long, However, this writing is addressed, contextually, to the ordinary citizen who finds himself personally obsessed with the delusional duty of arbiter of written propriety.
It is instructive to note that the observably, typical supporter of book banning and censorship, is a reductive-minded bigot with a faux, religious-moral ideation of propriety, in conformity to his skewed, prejudicial perception of rectitude, indeed, of reality, itself. We have read novels by Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin whose entitlement for inclusion on the official list of banned books can only be objectively attributed to their race. Protestations on the subjects of gender, sexuality, and physical love seem to reside in the nuanced psyche of the censor, rather than their acceptability..
Included in the long history when the Supreme Court of The United States, merited great respect and veneration, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote (Whitney v.California, 1927):
“If there be time to expose through discussion [and writings*] the falsehoods and fallacies, to avoid evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
Quod Erat Demonstatum.”.
-p.
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