Nothing will get you called a relgious-zealot prude out to impose your moral standards through censorship faster than asking whether public libraries have some responsibility to shield children from vile crap and its effects. The latest battle is over graphic novels, which have the look of comic books but have, to put it mildly, adult themes and treatments:
Sometimes the challenges are successful. In April, county officials in Victorville, Calif., removed from their library "Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics," because the book included nudity and sexuality.
"Some people find graphical depictions of things more offensive than text," said Carrie Gardner, a spokeswoman for the ALA's Committee for Intellectual Freedom and a professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
The issue has become prevalent enough that the ALA, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund earlier this year put out a set of recommendations for librarians looking to begin their own graphic novel collections but wanting to avoid controversy.
The recommendations largely explain how to deal with challenges, but also suggest shelving graphic novels in their own section or keeping those aimed at adults separate from those for youngsters.
And don't even bring up the subject of Internet porn. If libraries tried to block those services, it would be interfering with adult rights, and, besides, the filters don't work all that well. Your poor, deprived high school student wouldn't be able to complete his term paper on breast cancer. But then we are shocked when a TV station (good job, WANE) does a story about all the perverts coming to the library to get on porn sites in between scoping out all those available young targets.
