“When I wrote Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret in 1970, I gave three copies to my children’s elementary school. Signed copies. And the male principal took them off the shelf. I think he gave them back to me. And he said, ‘We can’t have these books here.’ Little did I know what was coming in the ’80s. And then I thought, that’s it. We’re done with this. That’s never going to happen again. And here we are again. On steroids.”
The above quote is part of Judy Blume’s rousing keynote speech to open the 2023 American Library Association Conference in Chicago on the 23rd June. It was a speech where she thanked librarians for defending the freedom to read against a politically-organised surge in book bans in the USA.
Judy also owns a bookstore in Florida, a state where teachers and librarians can now potentially be charged under a new law for making allegedly inappropriate books available to students. Charges that, if convicted, could lose them their jobs.
She has witnessed first-hand the effect of Florida’s book banning law on teachers and librarians. As Judy told the jam-packed conference audience: “There’s not a week goes by that I don’t have people in the store who are teachers, who are librarians, and who are being hit with this. One woman said to me, ‘This is my pension. I have worked all these years for this pension. I could lose it.’”
Serious stuff indeed. But are these the actions of a democracy or an authoritarian state? Whatever it is, I sure hope Australia never goes down this path.
If you’d like to read more about Judy’s speech, Publishers Weekly have posted the key points here.
Rebecca J. Chaney 