EDITORIAL: Read while you still can
During a 1953 commencement address at Dartmouth College, President Dwight D. Eisenhower urged graduates not to become “book burners.”
“Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book,” he told them.
Mt. Lebanon Public Library is trying to make sure patrons have an easier time doing that.
The library’s board of trustees recently declared it a “book sanctuary” and said the facility will “carry out its mission in providing a forum to exchange ideas through conversations and programs about intellectual freedom and related topics.”
As Robyn Vittek, the library’s director, succinctly put it: “What we’re really doing is saying we believe in the First Amendment and a patron’s right to choose the information that is important to them.”
In case anyone needs a history lesson, the First Amendment protects expression (including words on a page). That means you are free to express yourself … so are the people whose ideas you hate.
Efforts to ban books have been growing over the past several years. Common justifications for banning them, according to the American Library Association, include discussion of race, racism, equity and social justice, or the inclusion of LGBTQIA+ themes or characters.
Everyone should be concerned by this censorship, but we should be even more concerned about who its biggest proponents are.
Pressure groups and government entities – including elected officials, board members, and administrators – were responsible for 72% of the requests to censor books in schools or libraries, according to data released by the nonprofit American Library Association.
When the ALA marks Banned Books Week 2025 in October, the organization’s theme will be “Censorship Is So 1984,” a reference to George Orwell’s novel “1984.” Published in 1949, the novel is a cautionary tale about how government censorship can be used to maintain power, suppress dissenting voices and rewrite history.
It may seem that removing a couple of books from a library is harmless. We would argue it’s a small step toward bigger, scarier forms of censorship.
In a 1953 address to Congress on the internal security of the U.S., President Harry S. Truman offered a warning about what could happen when the powers that be trample the First Amendment.
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear,” he said.
No one should want that type of world.