The Library Bill of Rights - a critique - The Library Bill of Rights

Library Trends, Summer, 1996 by Gordon B. Baldwin

Commonplace and necessary removal of books from libraries makes the American Library Association nervous, reports the Orlando Sentinel Tribune on July 21, 1991. The paper recounts the removal of library books based on racial, ethnic, and sex biases. Should librarians remove books because they portray only women as nurses or because they use the male pronoun in referring to police and fire fighters? If libraries consistently follow the policy of avoiding gender stereotypes, then libraries should not shelve a Bible calling God "he." However, Courts will not forbid the sifting and winnowing of collections based on taste and judgment, because judges must not substitute their own subjective views for those of others. Books obviously become dated, and that ground alone justifies removal without violating any principle in the Library Bill of Rights. However, when libraries remove books because of "lacking educational value," the rationale may only mask more insidious purposes. Occasionally, but rarely, book removal decisions receive judicial review. Delcarpio versus St. Tammany Parish School Board (1994), for example, presents librarians with a victory, although only in a lower federal court in Louisiana. Whether the Supreme Court of the United States would approve appears less certain.

In Delcarpio, the District Court ruled that a school board decision to remove books containing detailed descriptions of voodoo spells violated the First Amendment and also the Constitution of Louisiana. By relying on the Louisiana Constitution, the Court guarded against Supreme Court review (because Michigan v. Long, 1983 lets decisions resting on state grounds to stand unless the decision violates constitutional standards). The story behind the decision is quite simple. The board removed a book from its libraries by Jim Haskins (1978) entitled Voodoo & Hoodoo. The book traces the development of tribal religion in Africa and describes its transfer to African-American communities in America, including Louisiana. About 97 of its 218 pages are devoted to graphic (and, to the board, rebarbative) descriptions of common voodoo "spells" or practices which the author included to preserve the folklore and knowledge. A petition containing 1,600 signatures claimed the practices grossly offensive, which they doubtless were to most eyes. A school committee declined to remove the book because it served an educational purpose and supplied information on a topic included in the eighth grade curriculum. However, after extensive discussion, the school board decided to remove the book by a 12 to 2 vote because they feared a reader might follow the recipes. Several parents, on behalf of their children, challenged that removal in federal court, and they prevailed.

The District Court rejected the school board's defense that their decision rested on a discretionary curricular judgment. The record belied that claim, the Court found, because opposition to the book rested on its contents and on a belief that the ideas in the book conflicted with the board's religious beliefs. The board's motivation and its purpose to promote their personal religious views flunked the constitutional test of neutrality. Depositions taken from school board members and from the minutes of their meeting clearly showed the religious motivations behind the removal. Disapproval of the book alone might not have mattered. It did matter that notions of Christianity drove their decision. Thus the District Court viewed the board action as fatal not merely because of animosity toward ideas, but because the board evinced a fatal favoritism for particular political, social, and moral ideas. However, most school boards could dress their policies in tolerable neutral language to allow the removal.