My Censored Life
I wish I didn’t have so much experience with censorship issues. On the one hand, it’s been a handy skill set throughout my library career. On the other, developing that skill meant hanging out with some very angry people.
From 1990–2014, I served as director of the Douglas County (Colorado) Public Library District. During that time I personally responded to about 250 challenges. By “challenges” I mean public attempts to remove or restrict access to various library resources. By “responding” I mean reviewing the entire resource, consulting library policies (adopted by the citizen Board of Trustees), deciding about the disposition of the challenged item or resource, and communicating that to the complainant. This response is called a Request for Reconsideration process, and it usually ends with an optional appeal to the board.
Mostly, the targets of challenges were books. But I also fielded attempts to remove or restrict access to magazines, movies, music, programs, displays, artwork, and digital databases—virtually anything a library provides. The good news: My library district checked out more than eight million items in 2014 alone, and had more than four million visits to our buildings and website. So “challenges” represented only a tiny fraction of public use—which is still true today. The not-so-good news: Those challenges often came from extremely vocal and influential people in the community. At the beginning, the complaints originated almost exclusively from the political and religious right. Over time, I saw challenges from parents across the political and religious spectrum, for reasons I’ll get to later in this book (see “Why People Challenge Library Resources”).
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From 2016 to 2018, I worked for the American Library Association (ALA) as the executive director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), which was founded in 1964. Many countries have library associations; however, ALA is the only one to have a dedicated office for resisting censorship. During my tenure at ALA, our office tracked and responded to around a challenge a day. In my almost three years there, this meant exposure to almost nine hundred attempts to block access to information. I also wrote OIF’s Field Report summary for all publicly reported challenges the following year. This national dataset differed from my Douglas County experience in several ways, unearthing a more generic panic over national demographic and cultural shifts.
In 2022, I took another public library director position, this time on Colorado’s Western Slope, which serves six rural communities. In my first eight months, I faced five challenges. Three of them reflected the huge shift in public challenges that the OIF has highlighted since 2020. Rather than being individual complaints, these were coordinated campaigns—often with an overtly partisan, Republican bias—likely designed to rouse the conservative base in time for the 2022 midterm elections.
All told, throughout my career as a defender of free speech and public access to knowledge in all its varied forms, I have dealt with more than a thousand attempts by the public to censor the library. It has always been interesting. It hasn’t always been fun.
Why People Challenge Library Resources
Every time I see the barrage of news photos or video clips of human faces distorted by anger, disgust, or outrage (imagine a sputtering Alex Jones in full rant), I think, “This is not an attractive look.” Why, then, do some people take it upon themselves to seek to silence others, dismantle longstanding public institutions, and make threats of personal and political violence?
One of them is the self-centered perspective: the idea that one’s own perspective is more important, more correct, than anyone else’s. I understand.
Why I Hate Brussels Sprouts
Brussels sprouts offend me.
When I was a child, my swing-shift boiler operator dad often cooked dinner. My mother, a nurse, usually worked the midnight shift at a Veteran’s Hospital. When dad cooked, we five kids got a slab of grilled rare steak, a glob of potato, and a vegetable (usually from a can). To my father, a child reared in the Depression, this is what prosperity looked like.
One night my dad served us brussels sprouts. They smelled bad, like old cabbage. The taste was disgusting. I bit into one and spat it out.
My dad’s rule was that you couldn’t leave the table till you were done. I slid one Brussels sprout under the table. (We once had a dog named Spunky; it may have been brussels sprouts that killed him.) I tried to disguise these evil little cabbage boils under potato skins. But over time, they got cold. I had to stay till I chewed and swallowed them all.
I hate brussels sprouts. The memory fills the back of my throat with bile, makes my eyes water. I am filled with resentment and anger.
One day, while walking through the frozen aisle at the grocery store, I saw a bunch of packages with clear labeling: brussels sprouts.
I went up to the store manager, whom I knew. “Brussels sprouts offend me!” I told him. “Don’t I deserve the right to come into a store and not see a product that offends me?”
He thought about it.
Then he said, “Nobody comes to the grocery store because it doesn’t have what they don’t want.” He paused. “Some people like brussels sprouts.”
It’s the same with a library. There are many other choices for my time and attention. I could work to eliminate the mere presentation of obviously offensive, morally repugnant vegetables—I mean books. But some people want them, and I am not actually charged with telling everybody else what they’re not supposed to like.
When brussels sprouts kill you (R.I.P. Spunky), I’ll be back with some hard evidence. I may push for legislation.
Mostly, though, I think what you don’t care for, you can avoid.
Life Transitions
A second reason people seek to censor concerns the shaky moments of parenthood.
Philosophies of child-rearing shift over time. According to the generational analysis of Strauss and Howe (see Generations), Baby Boomers were indulged in childhood, Gen-Xers were almost abandoned (“latch-key children”), Millennials were closely supervised, and Gen-Zs were almost smothered—a cycle of loosening then tightening protectiveness. Since the mid-1990s to the present, the cycle has been tightening fast: a shift from “helicopter” to “Velcro” parents.
Having kids rewires the adult brain. We remember things long forgotten, wisps of childhood cluelessness and magical thinking we group under the concept of innocence. We put our adult bodies and sensibilities between our child and the wide world, a task made more urgent by sensational news stories of abductions and abuse.
Daddy’s Roommate and Woods without Wolves
That struggle—to ensure an imagined innocence, and to fend off the darker or more complicated sides of adult life as long as possible—tends to sharpen at two distinct periods in the child’s life. The first is the transition from toddlerhood to childhood—ages four to six. In most American families, that’s the end of the bubble of parental control. Now comes exposure to play dates and daycare and preschool.
Many challenges to public libraries focus on picture books that deal with topics uncomfortable to some parents. In Douglas County, Daddy’s Roommate (about a man who leaves his wife and child to live with another man), made one patron so upset that they tore up the pages of the book into thirds and threw it on the library floor. But as I explained in a newspaper column I wrote at the time, we had bought the book because a local patron, whose husband had left her for another man, was trying to find a way to talk about this with her young son. We bought the book at her request to help her.
Mary Jo Godwin, former editor of the late Wilson Library Bulletin, once wrote: “A truly great library has something in it to offend everyone.” But libraries don’t buy books in order to offend. We buy them to support our community. It surprises some people that not everyone wants the same thing.
As I also explained in my newspaper column, books sparking such destructive attempts to silence a voice are probably needed, and perhaps urgently so. So I announced that following this vandalism, we would buy six more copies of Daddy’s Roommate, which did seem to stop further physical attacks against the book.
But even more frequently challenged were . . . fairy tales.
I once experienced two challenges to Little Red Riding Hood on the same day. In one version the Woodman shows up just in time to save Little Red. Then he slices open the wolf, and Granny emerges, whole. In the final scene Granny and the Woodman were having a glass of wine. The complaint: Granny is a drunk; the library was promoting senior alcoholism. My response to the patron was that if I had just been sliced out of a wolf, I’d want a drink, too. Granny had had a day.
In the second version, Little Red, too, was eaten by the wolf. In the final scene, she is floating in the belly of the wolf, suffused with a golden glow. At the door is the shadow of the Woodman. The complaint: “I didn’t read this to my daughter because it might have scared her.”
In the original fairy tale, of course, neither Granny nor Little Red made it. There was no Woodman. The point of the story was “don’t talk to strangers.”
At one level, parents get it. They know that it’s normal and natural to want to explore the world. And that frisson of fear—the Big Bad Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood—is part of the thrill of exploration. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. Parents understand their allure. But the needs of the parent are not the needs of the child. The parent wants woods without wolves. The child needs to know how to deal with wolves.
So some parents react to threatened separation— the child that no longer wants to be carried, or even held too closely—with deep emotion. It’s love and loss and grief. Parents want the clock to stop, to rewind. They believe that if they just don’t talk about life’s complexities, those complexities will never surface.
James LaRue has been a public library director for many years, as well as a weekly newspaper columnist and cable TV host. From January 2016 to November 2018, he was director of the Freedom to Read Foundation, and the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. He has written, spoken, and consulted extensively on intellectual freedom issues, leadership and organizational development, community engagement, and the future of libraries. He lives in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
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