David*Macinnis*Gill.com

I often won­der what it is that makes a Cen­sor cen­sor.  Is it a
sense of moral oblig­a­tion to the pop­u­lace?  Is it a desire to
pro­tect chil­dren and adult cit­i­zens from offen­sive lan­guage, ideas, and
sit­u­a­tions?  Is it an attempt to cast down all of the sub­jects
that run con­trary to the ideals the Cen­sor holds dear?  In many
cases, it’s dif­fi­cult to tell.  In the case of Cen­sor Steve
Abrams, Kansas State Board of Edu­ca­tion Chair­man, how­ever, the answer
is obvious.

It seems Cen­sor Abrams was talk­ing about his frus­tra­tion over Kansas
teach­ers declin­ing to acqui­esce to his ideals about intel­li­gent design
when he tan­gen­tially men­tioned a cen­sor­ship case in Kansas’ Blue Val­ley
school dis­trict in John­son County in which a list of four­teen books
have come under fire for con­tain­ing “obscen­i­ties, vul­gar lan­guage or
sex­u­ally explicit material.”

Says Cen­sor Abrams, “They seem to indi­cate, ‘We don’t care what the
state board does, and we don’t care what par­ents want, we are going to
con­tinue teach­ing evo­lu­tion just as we have been doing….But I guess we
shouldn’t be sur­prised, because super­in­ten­dents and local boards of
edu­ca­tion in some dis­tricts con­tinue to pro­mul­gate pornog­ra­phy as
’lit­er­a­ture,’ even though many par­ents have peti­tioned the local boards
to remove the porn.”

Ah, “porn,” is it now?  Here’s the list of Cen­sor Abrams’ so-called porn:
All the Pretty Horses, Cor­mac McCarthy
Ani­mal Dreams, Bar­bara King­solver
The Awak­en­ing, Kate Chopin
The Bean Trees, Bar­bara King­solver
Beloved, Toni Mor­ri­son
Black Boy, Richard Wright
Fallen Angels, Wal­ter Dean Mey­ers
Hot Zone, Richard Pre­ston
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
Lords of Dis­ci­pline, Pat Con­roy
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
Song of Solomon, Toni Mor­ri­son
Stotan, Chris Crutcher
This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff

Instead, Cen­sor Abrams sup­ports the local cen­sors’ effort to replace
the books above with clas­sics such as “Moby Dick” or with nov­els such
as “The Killer Angels,” which depicts graph­i­cally the death and
dis­mem­ber­ment of sol­diers in one of the blood­i­est bat­tles in our
history.

The scritch you hear is the sound of me scratch­ing my head.  Let
me get this straight: you want to replace Black Boy with a book that
has the word “Dick” in it?

Now who’s being pornographic?

But–but, the cen­sors may cry, that’s not what Moby Dick is about.  If you had read the book…

Ah.  There’s the rub.

“If you had read the book…”

Cen­sor Abrams and his peers don’t read books.  At least, they
don’t read whole books, lim­it­ing them­selves to the juicy tid­bits they
call porno­graphic.  Take it from some­one who has read all of the
books on the list—none of them are porn.  Some of them may be
offen­sive, some of them frank, some of them may be dis­turb­ing.  If
you don’t like any of these books, then don’t read them. It’s your
choice; it’s your freedom.

But don’t tell me I can’t read them.  And don’t tell my kids they can’t, either.

The peo­ple who wrote the First Amend­ment under­stood how impor­tant the
free­dom of expres­sion is to our democ­racy.  Smart peo­ple, those
folks. They fore­saw times when voices that were offen­sive or frank
needed to be heard, and they included pro­vi­sions for pro­tect­ing those
voices hun­dreds of years in advance.  

Now that’s what I call Intel­li­gent Design.