The Internet Scout report comes out every Friday. The report can be subscribed and delivered to your email inbox and you can also visit it online
https://scout.wisc.edu/report/current There is a surprising difference between getting it individually and trying to remember to take a look at it in a browser. Even if you delete the email without opening it, you get a reminder of the Internet Scout service by seeing it in your stuff.
This week's edition is all about banned books. That is roughly the same topic as information restriction or censorship. Lynn was an elementary school librarian, a high school librarian and a professor of school library studies. I just asked her if she had any sort of book she thought should be banned. She thought a while and mentioned "slash porn", books about hurting young women, usually naked and usually beautiful ones. I asked her why she might ban them and she agreed that she thought not having such books to look at might tip someone away from acting out criminal, cruel behavior. She has been professionally involved with books and libraries most of her adult life and is completely aware of the different sides of the issue, including the possibility that civil, respectful and compassionate discussions about internal drives and desires are often more effective than keeping secrets and denying feelings.
Volume 23 Number 39 includes access to lists of the most banned books of the past year in this country. All documents I have seen on the subject emphasize that many challenges, requests or demands for suppression get expressed only to a local librarian or bookseller. Here is a link to the American Library Association's page about the subject of banned books
http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/NLW-Top10
Looking over the list on the ALA's web site, it seems that a great many of the cited books refer to either homosexual or transsexual thoughts, information, tales, reports or stories. Since each of us exists because of the sexual activities of our parents, a Martian visitor might assume that all aspects of sex would be a very humdrum subject for humans. I assume that looking over the history of banned books, I might find books on the horrors of war, the honor of war, the righteousness of war and also books about the badness of some laws and social practices.
It seems to me that for most of us, homosexuality and transsexual problems do not occupy much of our lives. Subjects, new possibilities and fears arise and fall all the time. These days, many people can read but find television and other sources of visual and audio information preferable.
