As protests gather momentum against the removal of Paul Gravett’s Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics from the San Bernardino County library system, the man who ordered the book pulled is standing his ground.
Bill Postmus, Chairman of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, told the Victorville Daily Press that the book would stay off the shelves.
“A cartoon depicting a person engaged in a sex act with a giant hamster doesn’t belong in a San Bernardino County library. And our tax dollars shouldn’t be used to pay for it either, ” he said. “That’s simply what this is about,” Postmus said.
Svetlana Mintcheva of the National Coalition Against Censorship has written Postmus, asking him to reconsider.
The removal of the book was clearly based on objections to its content, which is impermissible under the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court said in Board of Education v. Pico, the constitution does not permit “officially prescribed orthodoxy” which limits what people may read, think, speak, or say.
Postmus is unrepentant:
“There is no doubt in my mind that the decision to remove the book was the right thing to do. As a public agency, the county has an obligation to protect the public, especially children.”
But in her letter, Mintcheva says that’s, well, un-American.
The book is now unavailable to all readers, including adults. Whatever arguments might be advanced to justify denying minors access to non-obscene sexual content are inadequate to deny adults access to legal materials. As the Supreme Court has repeated on numerous occasions, “The level of discourse reaching a mailbox simply cannot be limited to that which would be suitable for a sandbox.”
The Victorville article ends with this:
Mintcheva said the coalition will continue to monitor the case, while Postmus said he will continue to ensure that tax dollars are not being used to purchase what he described as “filth.”
Meanwhile, Publisher’s Weekly contacted library director Ed Kieczykowski, who basically admitted he was strong-armed into removing the book:
While he said that he could not “defend the book” because of the illustrations, Kieczykowski also made it clear that he was ordered to remove the book after a review by county supervisors.
I think this is a really important point that is getting obscured by the sex-with-hamsters angle: The library has a review procedure, which Postmus ignored in this case. In fact, it’s not clear to me that the board of supervisors took any official action, such as a vote in an open meeting. It looks like Postmus did this on his own. Does that send a chill down anybody’s spine?
Contacted by PW, San Bernardino county library director Ed Kieczykowski praised the book, calling it a “well written” and “definitive” work, while defending his actions to remove it. … While he said that he could not “defend the book” because of the illustrations, Kieczykowski also made it clear that he was ordered to remove the book after a review by county supervisors. A local newspaper has criticized the removal, calling it censorship, he said, but only public outcry could force the library to reinstate the book. “If we get a complaint, we have to take action,” he said. “I don’t have an easy answer for this.”
Hmmm. Public outcry? Here is the NCAC’s account of the incident, along with suggestions for action.
[...] MangaBlog writes about the protests against the removal of the book [...]