Legislators rush to protect us from librarians

When I was a teenager, a fellow member of my high school writer’s club, an earnest young man, recommended I read “Justine,” by the Marquis de Sade. I did.

“Justine,” is the story of an 18th-century French girl whose every effort to be decent and kind is rewarded with the sort of sexual cruelty to which de Sade lent his name, followed by lengthy philosophical discourses justifying this behavior. It is a deliberately vile, obscene and offensive book. It’s also stupefyingly predictable.

My memory is fuzzy, but I think I got “Justine” the way I got most books then, by going to the library and checking it out. I’m sure there was nothing secretive about it.

To be clear, this was Montgomery, Ala., in the 1960s.

Last week, 21 Republicans in the Georgia Senate raised the election-year ante in their ongoing quarrel with libraries, introducing legislation that would cut off government funding for the American Library Association (ALA). It also eliminates the current requirement that directors of the state’s public library system have a Librarian’s Professional Graduate Certificate.

Similar legislation, all of it touched off by a tweet, has been introduced in Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Montana, South Carolina and Wyoming.

ALA president Emily Drabinski wrote shortly after her election to the post last year that she “just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian” could be elected to head the post. She said later she didn’t anticipate that her words would be “used as a bludgeon against library workers across the country,” which shows a surprising naiveté, given the current political climate. In any case, it gave advocates for keeping a tighter lid on the books we read a wonderful opening.

The ALA’s website looks a lot like that of many professional organizations, with a bulletin board listing library jobs and discount offers for car rentals and dog sitters. There are articles opposing book banning, but this is, after all, the library association.

According to the Senate bill, however, the ALA promotes an “ideology” that most Georgians oppose. Also, “The bureaucracy that has developed around the certification of librarians has become heavily intertwined with and influenced by the American Library Association.”

The legislation doesn’t mention this, but removing the requirement certification also makes it a lot easier for politically connected people to get jobs as librarians.

The copycat bills aimed at the ALA are being promoted by the same organizations that have pushed for books to be banned from local and school libraries. In some cases they have even called for the arrest of librarians who check out suspect books to be arrested.

Ostensibly, the motivation for book banning has been to protect impressionable young minds from exposure to ideas that may lead them astray. In an age when kids text each other pictures of their private parts, it seems a little silly to start with libraries.

But it does set me to thinking about whether I was scarred by reading “Justine” at a tender age. I wasn’t. It might be that a future serial killer would have gotten more into the lengthy torture scenes, but the turgidly translated French would only have slowed him down somewhat from what he was going to do anyway.

“Justine” reinforced for me what I knew already, that there were some really sick people in this world, whose motives could be studied but never fully understood. More than anything, it taught me that something really dirty could also be really dull.

By no means am I suggesting that “Justine” be put on a high school reading list. But to go the other direction and attempt to insulate young readers from dangerous texts will only give the brighter ones incentive to read it for themselves.

I haven’t checked, by the way, to see whether “Justine” is still available in local libraries. The title hasn’t appeared on any of the banned lists I’ve seen. Come to think of it, it doesn’t touch on any racial issues and it isn’t about anybody’s sensitive explorations of their feelings about anything. You certainly couldn’t say it’s a feminist book, or in any way woke. So maybe “Justine” is still okay?