When I was a little kid there were legally banned books.
Not discouraged books. Not "the library didn't buy one" books, or "they removed it from the high school curriculum" books.
Banned. Books.
Lists of books... words on a page with no pictures... that if you stocked them in your book store you were arrested.
It was illegal to sell a copy of Henry Miller's novel Tropic of Cancer in the state of New York in 1962. And 1963. The state Supreme Court overturned the ban in 1964, only after the US Supreme court had ruled in favor of the same book.
New York state was only one of many, but it is the one best remembered because the entire publishing industry was in New York.
I am not an centegenarian recalling boxes of James Joyce's Ulysses being heaped into a furnace by the US government in the 1920s. (Which didn't stop until a 1933 court decision) This is what the world was like on the day JFK was shot. This is what the world was like a year after John Glenn orbited the Earth in outer space. This is what the world was like the day of the "I have a dream" speech.
I used to work in a major mainstream corporate chain bookstore in the 1980s that carried Penthouse and Hustler in the magazine selection, kept behind the counter. I got to see a minimum wage co-worker arrested and taken to jail in hand-cuffs for selling a magazine, available pretty much anywhere, to an undercover policeman—and this was inside the Washington beltway, not in some rural area. (The criminal statute considered the "seller" to be the person conducting the transaction... the cashier taking money and handing over the magazine.)
So when somebody starts advocating "good" censorship I hear/feel it the way I assume an older black voter does when somebody says, "There really ought to be an IQ Test for voting."
We had tests for voting. We had every kind of test for voting you can imagine. And the problem with those tests was 1) that they were a way for a majority view to suppress a minority view, and they always will be, since the majority makes the policy decisions in a democracy, and 2) having an equal say in your own fate is sacrosant.
It is natural for people who haven't seen certain things to relegate them to ancient times. A lot of people who started voting in the 1990s probably thought state-by-state suppression of minority voting was something won and done, something that would be rampant 20 years in the future.
Whoops. Support for rights is never a war won, no more than mowing your lawn stops grass from growing.
And I am always disheartened to see a certain generational drama play out time and again—that even though no sane educated person would care to defend the specifics of past censorship, people indulge in fantasies where if they ran the world they would ban only the "bad" books. Someday we will get censorship right so that it serves the people! (And fifty years hence new-and-improved censorship will look exactly as primitive and loutishly authoritarian as the early 1960s appear today).
Yes, we will get censorship right just like we will get forced abortion and voter supression right. I have known people in circumstances where they seriously should have gotten an abortion, and I have known people I would genuinely prefer did not vote... yet somehow I am not an advocate of forced abortion and a limited franchise.
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He also expressed concern...
