School Board To Hear All Sides In Book Debate

FAYETTEVILLE -- A line is drawn like the beginning of a child's game of tug of war. People on both sides pull hard on the words and concepts they represent. Words like pornography, homosexuality and casual sex.

Laurie Taylor, a mother of 12- and 13-year-old daughters, stands on one end as the voice of Parents Protecting the Minds of Children. The group organized last month and wants sexually explicit books and those they say promote homosexuality removed from school library shelves.

They say the issues are the children's safety and a parent's right to decide what is appropriate for his child.

On the other end, a loose-knit group of residents, many of them avid readers, oppose any attempt to disrupt the free flow of information from school libraries. Their group has no name or formal structure, but they, too, are speaking out.

The Fayetteville School Board must decide whether it will stand behind its own 20-year-old policy.

Book challenges and resulting legal battles occur across the country. The number of books Taylor challenged -- 58 in all -- has sparked considerable local debate and drawn the interest of groups and individuals nationwide.

Taylor wants those books put on restricted library shelves so students cannot check them out without parental approval.

"We filter the Internet, we rate movies, we rate television, we should be screening literature," she said.

Challenges Increasing

A total of 547 books were challenged in 2004, compared to 458 challenges in 2003, according to the American Library Association. The group estimates four to five unreported cases for each documented book challenge. A challenge is when a person asks a book be removed from circulation.

As in Taylor's challenge, sexual content, offensive language and homosexual themes are the most frequent reasons for seeking to remove books from school and public libraries, according to the library association.

Pat Scales, director of library services for the Governor's School for the Arts in Greenville, S.C., is the author of the book, "Teaching Banned Books" and a noted resource for the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom.

Scales said the list of books under consideration in Fayetteville is similar to a list appearing on numerous Web sites, including Parents Against Bad Books in Schools, based in Fairfax County, Va.; and American Family Association.

"For minors living at home, parents are still responsible for them so you've got to err on the side of the parents," said Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, based in Tupelo, Miss. "When the kids are off to college, then you can make the case that they should be able to handle it on their own."

"I'm not on a witchhunt," Taylor told about 60 patrons who attended an organizational meeting of her supporters last month. "If this is not resolved, we as parents lose a fundamental right to parent our children."

The steady increase in challenges in the past 20 years can be traced to the presidency of Ronald Reagan when the country began its swing to more conservative values, Scales said.

Schools serve all students, she noted.

"The entire community is not just the religious right," she said. "You cannot just have one view in a library."

The volume of book challenges forced the Fairfax County School District in Virginia to revise its challenge policy two years ago. The district, one of the largest in the country with more than 100,000 students, now limits the number of challenges a parent or a patron can file while other challenges are pending.

At one time, the district had 23 challenges from the same parent pending at the same time. Like Taylor's list, the books were challenged for sexual or homosexual themes.

Court Cases

A superintendent in Cedarville tried to restrict access to the "Harry Potter" series three years ago. He and his school board found themselves in federal court when parents sued on grounds the restrictions violated the students' First Amendment right to read and receive information.

The parents won.

Scales said the Fayetteville School Board needs to pay attention to that 2003 U.S. District Court ruling because it was the first court case dealing with putting books on a restricted shelf.

She served as an expert witness in another high profile lawsuit several years ago when students in Olathe, Kan., sued their school district over an attempt to ban "Annie on Your Mind."

The students won that case.

Scales said the Kansas lawsuit was filed when the superintendent broke his own policy by attempting to remove the book.

Dr. Kathleen Paulson, a Fayetteville gynecologist, has raised a similar issue with the action by the Fayetteville board on the first three books Taylor challenged.

The board vote violated its own policy when it approved a recommendation by Superintendent Bobby New to keep the books in the library but restrict student access to them, Paulson said.

"The decision was not theirs to make," Paulson said. She wants the board to rescind its earlier vote and follow the policy, which states "findings of the (review) committee will be implemented."

The policy was first adopted in 1974 and last amended in 1986.

New was "well-intentioned ... (by proposing) a compromise solution," Paulson said, but added the school board stepped outside its role as policy maker.

Kids Connect

Scales' advice to parents is to "make it a teachable moment" if their student brings a questionable book home from school.

Children will not learn "sympathy and empathy ... if they don't understand how others live," she said.

Reading about child abuse, for example, is not illegal; abusing children is, Scales said.

Taylor, who is now home schooling her daughters, argues the graphic content of the books encourages children to experiment in casual sex and promotes homosexuality or other behavior she considers deviant.

In an e-mail to board members this summer, Taylor wrote, "These books are not educational in content; they are raw, unadulterated sex, biased sexual rhetoric and instructional sexual pandering to children."

She has submitted lists of books to the school administration she finds offensive. Each title was accompanied by an excerpt from the book, although Taylor has readily admitted she has not read all of the books and found many of the excerpts on various Web sites.

"I don't have to read an entire book to decide if the book is pornographic to me," she said during the organizational meeting of the parents group.

Laurie Taylor's list of books in Fayetteville school libraries she found objectionable:

"Doing It" by Melvin Burgess

"Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk

"Between Lovers" by Eric Jerome Dickey

"Cheaters" by Eric Jerome Dickey

"The Other Woman" by Eric Jerome Dickey

"The Homo Handbook--Getting in Touch With Your Inner Homo" by Judy Carter

"Gays/justice: a study of ethics, society, and law" by Richard D. Mohr

"GLBTQ: the survival guide for queer and questioning teens" by Kelly Huegel

"Rainbow High" by Alex Sanchez

"Rainbow Boys" by Alex Sanchez

"Forever" by Judy Blume

"Kissing Kate" by Lauren Myracle

"Family Values: Two Moms and Their Son" by Phyllis Burke

"Eight Seconds" by Jean Ferris

"Annie on My Mind" by Nancy Garden

"Baby Be-Bop" by Francesca Lia Block

"Leave Myself Behind" by Bart Yates

"Always Running: La Vida Loca,: Gang Days in L.A." by Luis J. Rodriguez

"Beloved" by Toni Morrison

"Bless me, Ultima" by Rudolfo Anaya

"Breaking Boxes" by A.M. Jenkins

"Chronicle of a Death Foretold" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Deal With It! A whole New Approach to Your Body, Brain and Life as a Gurl" by Esther Drill, Heather McDonald, Rebecca Odes

"Druids" by Morgan Llywelyn

"Fade" by Robert Cormier

"Fair Game" by Erika Tamar

"Fallen Angels" by Walter Dean Myers*

"Fools Crow" by James Welch

"Girl Goddess #9: Nine Stories" by Francesca Lia Block

"How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" by Julia Alvarez

"I was a Teenage Fairy" by Francesca Lia Block

"Less Than Zero" by Bret Easton Ellis

"Like Water For Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments With Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies" by Laura Esquivel

"Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Lucky" by Alice Sebold

"My Father's Scar" by Michael Cart

"My Heartbeat" by Garret Freymann-Weyr

"One Hot Second: Stories About Desire" edited by Cathy Young

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Paula" by Isabel Allende

"Peter" by Kate Walker

"Push: A Novel" by Sapphire

"Ragtime" by E.L. Doctorow

"Rats Saw God" by Rob Thomas

"Snow Falling on Cedars" by David Guterson

"Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison

"The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison

"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky*

"The Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett

"The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold" by Francesca Lia Block

"Tenderness" by Robert Cormier

* Among the 10 most challenged books of 2004, according to the American Library Association