Bible makes Top 10 list of ‘challenged’ titles in U.S.
NEW YORK On the latest list of books most objected to at U.S. public schools and libraries, one title has been targeted nationwide, at times for the sex and violence it contains, but mostly for the legal issues it raises. The Bible.
“You have people who feel that if a school library buys a copy of the Bible, it’s a violation of church and state,” says James LaRue, who directs the Office for Intellectual Freedom for the American Library Association (ALA), which has released its annual Top 10 snapshot of “challenged” books, part of the association’s State of Libraries Report for 2016. “And sometimes there’s a retaliatory action, where a religious group has objected to a book and a parent might respond by objecting to the Bible.”
Challenges in Canadian libraries tend to differ from the U.S., says Alvin M. Schrader, a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and convener of the intellectual freedom advisory committee of the Canadian Library Association.
“Most of the challenged titles in the Canadian experience are one-time occurrences, so we don’t have a “Top 10” listing of most frequently targeted titles, as does ALA,” Schrader says. “One or two items are challenged twice in a given year. The four most frequent reasons that complainants give are clustered around four broadly construed themes: Explicit sexuality, age inappropriateness, violence, and offensive language.”
Perhaps the oddest title on the Canadian list is an objection to the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo.
Guidelines for the Office for Intellectual Freedom note the Bible “does not violate the separation of church and state as long as the library does not endorse or promote the views included in the Bible.”
The Bible finished sixth on a list topped by John Green’s Looking for Alaska, cited for “offensive language” and sexual content. The runner-up is the E.L. James romance Fifty Shades of Grey.
I Am Jazz, a transgender picture book by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, was No. 3, followed by another transgender story, Susan Kuklin’s Beyond Magenta. The list also includes Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Craig Thompson’s Habibi, Jeanette Winter’s Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan and David Leviathan’s Two Boys Kissing.