by Steve McKinzie

About the author: Steve McKinzie is the chair librarian at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

This week (September 21st–27th, 1997), the nation celebrates National Banned Book Week, a week-long propaganda fest and consciousness-raising extravaganza of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. The week’s promoters parade a list of books that they charge have been banned in libraries and schools across the nation, talk about the importance of First Amendment Rights, and lament the rise of censorship from what they consider to be the ill-informed and malicious enemies of freedom and American democracy—a group that includes the usual conservatives of various flavors and, of course, that enemy of everything dear to the national consciousness, the Christian Right.

The ALA’s Dishonesty

Now to begin with, most...