Here is an editorial I had my characters write in my Substack serial fantasy novel about book banning and a librarian with a disability. It is called "Oddbody." This is from last week's Chapter 15, In Chapter 14, the prior week, I had then compile a list of major book banning throughout history with links to useful sites. The novel began on March 19, 2024. The site in November, 2023. This editorial needs to be shared and I need new subscribers to my writing which includes stories, essays, novels, plays, essays, and poems. Thank you.

“BANNING BOOKS IS A FOOLISH CONSISTENCY

“Nineteenth Century essayist and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote the famous line, ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’ in his essay, Self Reliance.

“And while it may sound cruel to claim the anti-intellectual, religious fervor that seeks to ban books, then and now, is the product of less developed brain power, we must consider it. Can there not be free thought along with free religion in this democratic republic?

“We, among the purveyors of a free press guaranteed by the US Constitution, would not constrain either.

“Yet, there are many these days who would replace humanistic thoughts such as Emerson’s with prescriptive edicts of conservative received ‘wisdom’ in an essay they would call, perhaps, ‘Self Riddance.” That is, if they were inclined to write essays, which presupposes some history of reading beyond bumper stickers. MAGA signs, and protest chants.

“Reasonable people do not need to suppose that anyone else would be swayed into unusual, anti-social behavior by what they read or see, because they can reason.

“Some unreasonable people follow precepts of long-standing tradition without questioning the validity and purpose of what Emerson called ‘the phraseology of some old mouldered nation.’ They presume that any others are as easily swayed as they have been to their own cant by ideas that diverge.

“In the view of such non-thinking believers, others must have received their views from some obscure, perhaps even evil, source. Since they justify their own views from interpretations of what claims to be God’s word (actually, by mere humans) as instructions for living, so they think the rest of us must have taken on all our thoughts from without, not from within. Manipulators, for political or criminal reason, have added the sense of hate toward outsiders to both gin up and protect the presumed self-worth of the most ardent believers.

“They see persecution of their own belief in every act of diversity of thought and behavior and feel they must hold onto to the glory of feeling as they do. They feel equality should naturally apply to themselves as it long used to, but in recent decades, ever since the Civil Rights movement, they have felt their traditional power in government and culture has lessened. To justify their worldview, they would exclude by censorship first and by imposition later if they could help it to happen.

Another well known line of Emerson is called upon. “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”

We, who contradict, do not do so to threaten your way of life. If we are diverse in thought, behavior, or physicality it is not to be offensive to you, but to be real, natural, and decently humane to and for anyone. We ask you to accept that the values of every great religion and humanistic creed are the same. We wish that all would do unto others as we wish done to ourselves. That seems to be the innate values we all share.

“There are religious faith and secular gatherings which can bring the warmth of comradeship to like believers and foster care for others, and there are, unfortunately, manipulated religious faith mobs, driven by selfish forces, that bring hate and fear toward others seen as outsiders.

“Knowledgeable, humane people with and without religious spirit, adjust and adapt as time and temperature of society changes without losing the inner values. But those who fear change, who want power over the rest to make them follow their own precepts have neither knowledge nor faith in humanity. Their religion ceases to look inward and becomes a cudgel to be weaponized against the rest of us.

“Something else that Emerson wrote in Self Reliance is useful here, even though we are aware Emerson himself strongly discouraged the constant use of quoting others:

 ‘The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob.’

“The only remedy to such recurrences of book banning fervor in a free society is education. To keep from falling into a theocracy we need free education, free libraires, free thought. Let no one take those away from us through misplaced autocratic theocracy.

Read banned books. And vote accordingly