Can You Stand Another “Re-run”?

The current wave of book banning efforts I referenced a few days ago reminded me of an essay I wrote about the importance of intellectual freedom some twenty-five years ago, for an ALA publication. I dug it out, and decided the observations were still valid–and, unfortunately, even more relevant. So– with apologies for both the length and self-citation– I’m sharing it.

_______________

Not too long ago, I had a conversation with a librarian involved professionally with issues of intellectual freedom. “Sometimes,” she said, “I get so tired of it. I wonder why I continue to fight.” I’ve thought about that conversation several times; if I could do an instant replay, I think I would tell her that I know why she keeps at it. It’s because it is so important.
I spent six years as Executive Director of the Indiana affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, and of all the lessons I learned during that time, the most profound was this: the future of western liberal democracy rests on the preservation of intellectual freedom.
If that statement seems extravagant, consider both the ideological basis of liberal democracy and the nature of contemporary threats to that tradition.
Our national history would have been impossible without the Enlightenment concept of the individual as a rights-bearing, autonomous being. That concept is integral to our legal system; it is the foundation upon which our forbears erected the Bill of Rights. The Founders envisioned the good society as one composed of morally independent citizens whose rights in certain important circumstances “trumped” both the dictates of the state and the desires of the majority.
Current assaults on that worldview come primarily, although certainly not exclusively, from communitarians of both left and right. Michael Sandel, Mary Ann Glendon and others complain that the American emphasis on individual rights has gone too far, that it is time to readjust the balance between individual liberty and the “common good.” The “common good” is presumably to be defined collectively; that is, by the majority.
There is enormous appeal to this argument. In a world that seems increasingly complex, impersonal, and litigious, a world over which individuals have less and less control, the notion of “community,” like “family,” offers nourishment and empowerment. Who does not long, in some part of her psyche, for a warm family, friendly neighborhood and supportive tribe, where one is valued and/or unconditionally accepted, and where everyone shares the same life goals and values? Freud suggested that the need to lose oneself in a collective identity is the most ancient, persistent and universal force operating on the human species. The problem, of course, is that majorities can be every bit as tyrannical as solitary despots, and there is no guarantee that my family’s values will be the ones that prevail, or that my tribes’ folkways will be the ones that are followed. The fundamental issue in every society is where to strike the balance between human liberty and communal norms. Ultimately, the debate comes down to a conflict between libertarian and collectivist visions of the good life.
In this war over competing worldviews, intellectual freedom is the battlefront. Discussions of the First Amendment often proceed as if the expressive freedom provisions are separate from the religious liberty clauses. They aren’t. In fact, the First Amendment rests upon a magnificent unifying premise: the integrity and inviolability of the individual conscience. The First Amendment is really an integrated whole, protecting our individual rights to receive and disseminate information and ideas, to consider arguments and theories, to form our own beliefs and craft our own consciences. It answers the fundamental social question– who shall decide? — by vesting that authority in each individual, subject to and consistent with the equal rights of others.
Our whole experiment with democratic governance rests on that foundation. As Alexander Mieklejohn famously observed, a nation that is afraid of an idea–any idea–is unfit for self-government. Implicit in the First Amendment is the legal system’s concept of personal responsibility, the University’s commitment to academic freedom, the moral authority of the clergy, the independence of the media, and the legitimacy of the political process.
Those who oppose free expression rarely, if ever, see themselves in opposition to the western liberal democratic tradition. Most of the people who want to ban the book or painting, who want to protect the flag or the Virgin Mary from desecration, are simply acting on their belief in the nature of the public good. Censors see unrestrained freedom as a threat to the social fabric, while civil libertarians believe the greater danger consists in empowering the state to suppress “dangerous” or “offensive” ideas. Censors see no reason to protect expression of low value–no point in protecting the marketplace for the exchange of shoddy goods. They have enormous difficulty understanding the difference between protection of the principle of free speech and an implicit endorsement of the offensive material at hand. And they have little or no appreciation for the argument that once one hands over to the state the authority to decide which ideas have value, no ideas are safe.
I spent my years at the ACLU battling the usual, recurring attempts to control what others might read, hear or download. I attended a public meeting in Valparaiso, Indiana, where an angry proponent of an ordinance to “clean up” local video stores called me “a whore.” I was accused of abetting racism for upholding the right of the KKK to demonstrate at the Statehouse. I was criticized for failure to care about children when I objected to a proposal restricting minors’ access to library materials. In each of these cases, and dozens of others, the people who wanted to suppress materials generally had the best of motives: they wanted to protect others from ideas they believed to be dangerous. To them, I appeared oblivious to the potential for evil. At best, they considered me a naïve First Amendment “purist;” at worst, a moral degenerate.
My introduction to the politics of free speech really came several years before my stint at the ACLU, when I was retained as local counsel to the plaintiffs in American Booksellers v. Hudnut. The case involved a challenge to an ordinance drafted by Catherine MacKinnon, a law professor, and Andrea Dworkin, a feminist author. Both are well known crusaders against pornography, which they define quite differently than the law defines obscenity, and which they argue is more harmful to women than to men. Their ordinance attempted to define as action (rather than expression) sexually explicit materials depicting the “subordination of women.” Such “action” was then treated for legal purposes as sex discrimination. (“When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty, “it means exactly what I say it means!”) MacKinnon and Dworkin had shopped their proposal around the country without much success before they found eager proponents in Indianapolis.
While the Courts would make short work of the ordinance, the politics of its passage was an eye-opening experience. Bill Hudnut was, and remains, a close personal friend; I had been the Corporation Counsel (chief lawyer) in his administration. To this day, despite lengthy conversations, he does not see the implications of the ordinance he signed. Bill had been an active Presbyterian minister before assuming office, and simply was appalled by materials that he felt degraded women. When MacKinnon and Dworkin enlisted a local female Councilor on behalf of their pet project to “protect” women, he was supportive. The Councilor has not been identified with women’s causes either before or after her sponsorship of the ordinance. She has, however, been supportive of efforts to restrict children’s access to videos in the public libraries, and has generally been an ally of the religious right. Her alliance with MacKinnon and Dworkin, widely considered to be “radical feminists,” was surreal.
On the evening the vote was taken, busloads of people from fundamentalist churches filled the Council chambers. To the eternal credit of Indianapolis’ women’s organizations, there was no support from local feminists. Only three people had been given permission to speak against passage–me, as a courtesy shown to a former member of the administration; Bill Marsh, a professor of Constitutional law who was then Vice-President of Indiana’s ACLU; and Sam Jones, the Executive Director of the Urban League. Even Councilors who had great qualms about the ordinance were unwilling to stand against the sea of faces from area churches. (The trouble with representative government, as a friend once bitterly remarked, is that it is representative.) One after another, uncomfortable Councilors rose to “explain” their votes; my favorite came from a longtime friend, who said that —while he had “great respect for Mrs. Kennedy’s legal opinion”–he wanted the record to show that he was “against pornography.” The crowd cheered approvingly.
Most of those who voted for the ordinance knew it stood virtually no chance in court. They were willing to spend some tax dollars to defend it, in order to avoid the pain of opposing the righteous folks who had taken the time and trouble to attend the meeting. And the courts did as expected; Judge Sarah Evans Barker issued an eloquent, ringing endorsement of the principles of free speech in her District Court opinion striking down the measure. The Seventh Circuit and Supreme Court each affirmed, and the case has since become a staple in courses on Free Speech and Constitutional Law.
In many ways, American Booksellers v. Hudnut is a perfect example of what the Founders feared when they warned of “the tyranny of the majority” and the need to guard against popular passions. The majority of citizens saw the debate in very simple terms, as did my Councilor friend: one is either for or against “pornography.” Quibbles about what pornography is, concerns about vagueness or over-breadth, were dismissed as lawyer weaseling; like Potter Stewart, they might not be able to define pornography, but they knew it when they saw it.
For civil libertarians, of course, the issue was very different. We were not arguing for the value of pornographic speech–although we were more open to the possibility that pornographic expression might, in fact, have some value. The issue was–and is–our right to decide for ourselves what books we shall read, what ideas we shall consider, what opinions we shall hold, free of government interference. Once the state asserts a prerogative to determine which ideas we may entertain, the balance has shifted from the right of the individual to the power of the government. At that point, citizens no longer have rights, but privileges that may be revoked whenever the political winds shift. For me as a civil libertarian, the issue is not which books I read; the issue is who decides which books I read?
The western democratic tradition literally depends upon the answer to that question.
Those of us who understand the nature of the debate over intellectual freedom in this way must contend with a formidable deficit in citizenship education. Both at the ACLU and at IUPUI, where I currently teach law and public policy, I have encountered widespread ignorance of the most basic elements of the American constitutional system. We desperately need to improve understanding of the theory of limited government and individual rights –not so that people will necessarily come to the same conclusions I reach, but so that we can at least argue about the same issues.
People try to remove materials from library shelves or the corner video store because they find the materials offensive. They try to prevent Klan marches because they disagree strongly with the hateful message of the Klan. Their arguments are against these particular ideas. They are not generally trying to strengthen the power of the state, nor intending to circumscribe the exercise of personal moral autonomy. Civil libertarians see those outcomes as inevitable consequences of censorship, however, and so those are the issues we address. In a very real sense, it is a case of culture warriors talking past each other.
People like my librarian friend, who see the fundamental relationship between the marketplace of ideas and self-government, who recognize the holistic nature of individual rights, simply must keep trying to make those connections visible to the general public. We must all work to raise the level of familiarity with the underlying principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We must agitate for more and better government instruction in our schools, and we must insist on more honest discourse from our political leaders and the media. We must constantly reinforce the lesson that the proper response to a bad message is not government censorship, but free citizens offering a better message.
Somehow, we must get the general public to understand that when we use the power of the state to decide what citizens may read or view, we aren’t censoring smut, or protecting children, or prohibiting blasphemy, or respecting the flag. We are undermining the values that lie at the very core of our national identity.
Comments

Who Decides?

The Bill of Rights–as I repeatedly note– addresses areas of citizens’ lives that the Founders marked “off limits” to government authority, answering the question “who decides this?” in favor of individual citizens.

That framing is one way to look at today’s vicious culture war.

Those of us who want to maintain the constitutional line between matters government is authorized to decide and matters remitted to our individual consciences are under attack by the autocrats and theocrats who want to use the power of the state to impose their favored choices on everyone else. Nowhere is that clearer than in the persistent efforts to control what books we can read and what information we can access.

A recent article from Axios focused on that battle.

Attempts to ban books at public libraries have reached record levels, pitting right-wing parents and legislators against those who oppose censorship.

Driving the news: The culture war over books has become a legislative battle as well.

  • Last year, more than 150 bills in 35 states aimed to restrict access to library materials, and to punish library workers who do not comply,” per the New York Times.
  • As a counterpunch, legislators in blue and purple states are coming to the aid of librarians to help them fight efforts to remove books with certain racial, sexual or gender-related themes.
  • Last June, Illinois became the first state to pass a law penalizing libraries that ban books.

What they’re saying: “We have broadened the framing to refer to ‘intellectual freedom challenges'” rather than just book bans, AnnaLee Dragon, executive director of the New York Library Association, tells Axios.

The hypocrisy is obvious. As one librarian reportedly told Axios, “It’s the same people who are out touting the freedom to own a gun. But you don’t think I have the right to pick a book for my kid?”

The American Library Association has mounted a campaign, Unite Against Book Bans, to encourage people to take action locally, and it’s also selling a workbook for librarians about “navigating intellectual freedom challenges together.”

Libraries have long been seen as cradles of democracy; in the words of former U.S. Senator Wendell Ford, “If information is the currency of democracy, then libraries are its banks.”

The current attacks are coming from what the article calls “a small but vocal minority” that opposes libraries precisely because they are democratic– inclusive, affirming, and intentional. That minority sees access to information as a threat.

The current onslaught has come at a time when libraries are serving an expanding variety of community needs. Librarians have gotten used to tackling whatever tasks society demands of them, and those demands continue to broaden. As Time Magazine recently reported, 

Libraries are among the most visited public service institutions, totaling more than 1 billion visits annually with users turning to libraries for critical educational services in addition to books. In recent years, as many as 118 million participants have taken part in nearly 6 million programs focused on early and family literacy, digital literacy instruction, after-school homework support and summer reading programs for youth, adult literacy and basic education, career readiness, small business development, arts and humanities programming, English for Speakers of Other Languages instruction, and special programs for adults navigating memory loss and reentry after incarceration.

The effort to restrict what information other citizens can access has accelerated.

Last year there were 1,269 attempts to censor library books, the highest number of attempted book bans in the two decades that ALA has been compiling data about censorship in libraries. During this same period, 2,571 unique book titles were targeted for censorship, an astonishing 32% increase over 2021, with 40% of book challenges occurring in public libraries, while the remaining nearly 60% occurred in school libraries. As these threats to the right to read continue, in all too many cases, parents are being roped into banning books they haven’t even heard of before, let alone read, by extremist groups using book banning as a political tactic. At a school board meeting in Pennsylvania this year at which book censorship was being recommended, one parent supporting the banning of a title proclaimed, “I have not read the book myself, I don’t intend to read the book, but I have had portions distributed to me of this book.”

If we have come to a time in this country when parents can be successfully swayed into restricting access to books they haven’t read, what does that mean for our future as a nation? What other personal and constitutional rights might next be compromised?

Some constitutional questions are open to interpretation. This one isn’t.

The First Amendment protects our right to decide for ourselves what we and our children read.

Comments

Now They’re After The Libraries

The Indiana General Assembly is back in session. This time, mercifully, it’s a short session, but that hasn’t stopped the supermajority from continuing its efforts to turn Indiana into Mississippi.

A commentary by my friend Michael Leppert recently began by poking fun at bills filed by lawmakers who were apparently unable to employ legislative language that would actually accomplish what seemed to be their goals. He  then moved on to bills introduced so far during this legislative session that “aren’t humorous, or merely humorless. They are hateful.” 

One of those hateful bills is House Bill 1291, filed by Rep. Chris Judy, R-Fort Wayne. That bill

attempts to erase the word “gender” from the Indiana Code and replace it with “biological sex.” He wants to legally cancel all transgender people in Indiana. If his bill were to pass, as filed, transgender people would no longer exist in the state. The bill creates definitions for other things too. Words like “woman,” “man,” “girl,” and “boy,” would now all mean what the legislature says they mean. 

Leppert is entirely correct that the cited bill is hateful, and its effects would be assisted and strengthened by a seemingly unrelated effort to destroy–or at least severely hobble–the state’s public libraries.

As WFYI reports

Indiana Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that would drastically change the way public libraries are funded and limit the types of events and activities they can host. The legislation could also potentially result in decreased funding for library services.

Senate Bill 32, authored by Sens. Jim Tomes (R-Wadesville) and Gary Byrne (R-Byrneville), would eliminate the ability for public libraries to impose property taxes. Instead, libraries would need to submit their budgets for approval to their local city or county government, in the same way that other municipal departments do. 

The proposal comes months after legislation that makes it easier for community members to request removals of books from schools was signed into law. And libraries across the country have come under fire in recent years for hosting events like drag queen story hours, or for including books in their young adult collections that some people find objectionable.

Byrne, you will recall, was the lawmaker trying to stop a nonprofit program giving voters  free rides to the polls (although Leppert points out that the language in his bill was so imprecise it would prevent transit companies from giving any person a free or reduced fare for any reason on election days.)

Senate Bill 32 would have a massively negative impact on libraries and their patrons. For one thing, it would allow counties to choose not to fund a public library at all. But the bill would do more than “merely” strike at library funding; it would prevent libraries from engaging in a wide variety of activities that currently benefit their communities.

The proposed legislation would also restrict libraries to a set of “core functions,” that are limited to public access to library materials, quiet areas for study, technical assistance, and acquisition of services for members of the public.

But public libraries typically offer a much wider array of services, including early literacy programs, science, technology, education and math programs, as well as dedicated makerspace labs, community programming like author talks, music performances and art exhibits.

Increasingly, libraries have also begun to offer social work services to help patrons gain access to government assistance, housing and mental health services.

In a statement, the Indiana Library Federation said the bill doesn’t take into account the ways modern public libraries operate as community hubs. As the Library Federation points out, “Not providing library patrons with these services would directly affect public libraries from meeting Indiana State Library compliance standards.”

The Federation also listed the numerous ways that public libraries are fiscally accountable. They are governed by boards whose members are appointed by local elected officials.

Library boards approve annual budgets, and they host public meetings and hearings on those budgets. Library budgets are publicly available, and they’re also submitted to the state’s Department of Local Government Finance and the State Board of Accounts for review. Rogers said libraries are also routinely audited by the state.

If passed, the bill would result in an increased administrator workload for municipal and county governments — which would have to take on the duties of budget oversight and approval for libraries, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency.

But if libraries are free to enlighten (or–horror of horrors–to host Drag Queen story hours) some citizens might realize–among other things– that trans people exist!

Your Indiana Republican legislators: working around the clock to defund and neuter any part of government that might educate Hoosier citizens. 

Comments

Just WOW…

It appears that our fearless (okay, feckless) lawmakers have identified a dire threat to America and its children–librarians. The Washington Post recently reported on one of the current allegations–this one by Senator Mike Lee of Utah–

“The goal is to sexualize children — to provide minors with sexually explicit material … and then hide this content from the parents.”

The American Library Association is facing a partisan firefight unlike anything in its almost 150-year history. The once-uncontroversial organization, which says it is the world’s largest and oldest library association and which provides funding, training and tools to most of the country’s 123,000 libraries, has become entangled in the education culture wars — the raging debates over what and how to teach about race, sex and gender — culminating in Tuesday’s Senatorial name-check.

Lee isn’t alone. The increasingly insane Right is intent upon painting the ALA as a defender of pornographic literature for children. MAGA warriors insist that the nation’s libraries, including school libraries, are filled with sexually explicit, inappropriate texts.

Attacks on libraries are part and parcel of what Isaac Asimov called the “cult of ignorance,” a phenomenon that we see in contemporary dismissals of expertise as “elitism”and the cyclical eruptions of anti-intellectualism in the United States. Asimov’s famous quote probably says it best:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

America’s libraries are our intellectual gatekeepers, safeguarding our ability to access practical information as well as hard-won wisdom that has been built up over centuries. Attacking them is an attack on human intellectual progress–a declaration that, as Asimov aptly framed it, ignorance is just as good as knowledge.

We’ve been here before. In a speech in 2014, I argued that libraries as we know them are important protectors of what I call “the American Idea.” I spent six years as Executive Director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, and of all the lessons I learned during that time, the most profound was this: the future of western liberal democracy rests on the preservation of intellectual freedom.

That preservation, of course, is the library’s mission.

America’s Constitution is grounded in the Enlightenment concept of the individual as a rights-bearing, autonomous being. That concept is integral to our legal system; it is the foundation upon which our forbears erected the Bill of Rights. The Founders envisioned the good society as one composed of morally independent citizens whose rights in certain important circumstances “trumped” both the dictates of the state and the desires of the majority.….The First Amendment is really an integrated whole, protecting our individual right to receive and disseminate information and ideas, to consider arguments and theories, to form our own beliefs and craft our own consciences.  It answers the fundamental social question– who shall decide? — by vesting that authority in each individual, subject to and consistent with the equal rights of others.

Implicit in the First Amendment is the legal system’s concept of personal responsibility, the University’s commitment to academic freedom, the moral authority of the clergy, the independence of the media, and the legitimacy of the political process.

That exercise of personal responsibility requires untrammeled access to information. For that matter, protection of civil liberties of every kind depends upon  and requires intellectual freedom.

As I noted on this site back in April, the culture warriors out to terrorize Marian the Librarian are seeing considerable success. In an Urban Library Trauma study conducted in 2022, more than two-thirds of respondents reported encountering violent or aggressive behavior from patrons at their library.

Groups such as Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education and Parents Defending Education aren’t the only ones fighting to remove books by Black and LGBTQ+ authors.  Proud Boys have taken to storming into Drag Queen Story Hour events, for instance, causing serious fear for patrons and librarians.

Lest we give these censors the benefit of the doubt, thinking they are identifying mostly trashy books, it’s instructive to consult the AIA’s annual list of the most frequently challenged books. They include Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Challenges are overwhelmingly aimed at books by or about LGBTQ+ people, and books critical of racism. (The most censored books of all times are 1984, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, The Great Gatsby, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Lord of the Flies.)

The culture war isn’t “just” about democracy versus Christian Nationalism. It’s also about ignorance versus knowledge.

Comments

They’re Coming For Those Subversive Librarians…

I regularly read Juanita Jean, The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Shop, to keep up with the governmental insanities we’ve come to expect in the Lone Star State and elsewhere. A recent post reported that a Texas county has joined the battle against those dangerous librarians who are threating…something or other.

Poor Llano County. Some federal judge has just ordered the county to return twelve (yes, count ’em, 12) children’s books to their public library shelves. It seems that the books offended the sensibilities of some adults who object to the racial and LGBT+ issues that are raised in them.

So rather than complying with the judge’s order, Llano County Commissioners are considering an old and accepted recourse: the equivalent of filling in the swimming pool.

Rather than bend to the Feds, the Llano County Commission is studying on nose-thumbing (and nose-cutting/face-spiteing) by closing all of their county libraries.

It’s a really great solution, see. No one can blame them for depriving their children of learning about racism and gender issues if no one in the county can learn about anything at all.

The Commisioners later backed down in the face of ferocious public pushback.

Texas isn’t alone. Republicans all over the country are moving against these purveyors of books with language or ideas that the GOP finds unacceptable. In Missouri, House Republicans recently voted to defund all of the state’s public libraries.  The Republican chair of the budget committee was quoted as saying  that cutting the aid was retaliation for an ACLU lawsuit to overturn a new state law banning sexually explicit material in school libraries.

Apparently,  books and libraries are  “woke.”

Librarians are reeling from the onslaught.In one instance reported by the Guardian, library personnel who had planned to launch a bookmobile in a bus that would visit various sites across town, including three schools, abandoned that plan when a law criminalizing anybody “who makes visually explicit materials available at a school” went into effect. They decided to keep the bookmobile away from schools, noting that violators of the new, nebulously worded law would face up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,000. As one of the librarians explained, “We are unsure on what someone can interpret as sexually explicit.”

The quotation reminded me of a passage in Nadine Strossin’s 1996 book, Defending Pornography. Since “porn” is in the eye of the beholder,  Strossin wrote “If it turns you on, it’s pornography. If it turns me on, it’s erotica.”

Throwing around and misusing vague labels, of course, is what those who have appropriated and misused the label “conservatives” love to do.

Conservative parent groups that formed to oppose masks during the pandemic, only to pivot to the fight against “critical race theory”, have now begun to focus on scrutinizing books, often by and about queer and Black people, and lobbying for their removal from library shelves. Politicians have hopped on the bandwagon, drafting legislation to supposedly protect children against indoctrination and predation, calling out books by name and making it impossible for the people who run schools and libraries to do their jobs. Fringe activists and government officials are taking to social media, holding meet ups, and riling up their bases with reports of indoctrination, propaganda and the supposedly pornographic materials that lurk on the bookshelves of public institutions.

The culture warriors out to terrorize Marian the Librarian are seeing considerable success. In an Urban Library Trauma study conducted in 2022, more than two-thirds of respondents reported encountering violent or aggressive behavior from patrons at their library.

Conservative parent groups such as Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education and Parents Defending Education aren’t the only ones invested in the fight against books by Black and LGBTQ+ authors. Rightwing extremist groups have also adopted the cause. Proud Boys have taken to storming into Drag Queen Story Hour events, for instance, causing serious fear for patrons and librarians.

Lest we give these censors the benefit of the doubt, thinking they are identifying mostly trashy books, it’s instructive to consult the AIA’s annual list of the most frequently challenged books. Among others, recent lists include Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

The list as a whole is revealing: challenges are overwhelmingly aimed at books by or about LGBTQ+ people, and books critical of racism. According to Google, the most censored books of all times are 1984, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple,The Great Gatsby, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and
Lord of the Flies.

Twentieth -century political philosopher Alexander Mieklejohn said it best: People afraid of an idea–any idea–are unfit for self-government. 

Comments