Freedom to Read Week in Canada: February 23 to March 1

This year I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about banned books (and it’s only February).

In the United States, organized efforts are removing LGBTQ+ books from classrooms and school libraries; these initiatives are spreading to Canada and affecting community libraries, too, which is shocking.

Next week is Freedom to Read Week in Canada, and I would like a noisy, activist movement that insists on freedom of expression and advocates for the right of children and young people to access books that reflect all kinds of individual and family experiences.

The Canadian-specific sources I’m locating are, in many instances, pretty dated, like Devon Peavoy’s “Banning books, burning bridges: Recognizing student freedom of expression rights in Canadian classrooms” from way back in 2004. I’m doing a deeper dive into the research today.

But the reason the sources are dated, of course, is that this battle was already fought and won: remember Little Sisters? Briefly, the owners of a Vancouver west end bookstore were contending with a “reverse onus” to prove that books and other materials that they were importing were not obscene. The Canadian Supreme Court held that blocking the erotic materials at the border violated both freedom of expression and equality rights (because mainstream bookstores were not subject to the same intense scrutiny).

Just pausing to note that the late Jim Deva and Bruce Smyth are Canadian heroes. This case dragged on for a decade.

But now the debate has shifted–again, because classroom and library censorship issues are not new in again–to impressionable young minds, and the straw man of parental rights. (This is a longer argument, so briefly: in the U.S., in particular, ethnocultural minority members are being cynically deployed as representative parent complainants, with claims that their religious/cultural rights are violated when their children are exposed to particular kinds of LGBTQ+ materials in public schools. My answer to this: there are separate schools, with a religious focus, that parents can select if they would like their children protected from mainstream views; and the large, well-funded organizations using credulous parents to promote a broader bigoted agenda should be ashamed of themselves.)

So let’s talk about an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case that has me furious, and not just because the books that are being impugned are lovely.

Here’s USA Today on the case:

“The court on Friday agreed to decide whether Maryland parents who object to “Pride Puppy” and a handful of other books with LGBTQ+ characters should be able to get their children excused from the classroom when the controversial reading materials are being used in the Montgomery County Public Schools.

Lawyers for a group of parents from different religious backgrounds who are asking for an opt-out said their only other choice is send their kids to private school or to homeschool.”

Yup. That sounds about right to me. They are not being deprived of the right to send their children to public schools; they’re just being informed that they can’t dictate the education their children receive there, which is LGBTQ+ inclusive because (and we need to keep reminding people about this) there are LGBTQ+ kids in every classroom, and they need to see themselves, their families, and their communities reflected in both fiction and non-fiction.

Now should kids be excused?

This is trickier, I think. I attended a French Catholic elementary school in Quebec during the era when there were parallel English Protestant and French Catholic boards (and there must, somewhere, have been provisions for English Catholics and French Protestants?). I went to schools in both commissions scolaires. But when I was attending a French Catholic public school (which was lovely), the Seventh Day Adventist student and I were sent to the library during catechism classes.

Heaven.

No, really. It was a terrific library, with a reading nook, and I devoured all of the Comtesse de Ségur’s didactic children’s novels.

When it came time for First Communion, the visiting archbishop gave me a paperback Bible inscribed “pour la petite protestante.” Adorable.

And on Fridays, our English teacher, soeur Hélène, brought the discarded outside pieces from manufactured communion wafers for us to snack on alongside our free, often half-frozen cartons of Quebec milk, which was some kind of scheme to either help dairy farmers or promote schoolchildren’s nutrition.

No idea, but in winter the milk crystals were a lot of fun to try to smush up to consume.

I don’t think that exiting the classroom to avoid being proselytized to by Catholics did me any harm; I also don’t think that staying would have done me any harm (but the extra library hours were a bonus).

But is this a precise analogy?

Nope.

Because while religious education deserves special treatment, including classroom exclusion, secular education, with a focus on human rights and equality, does not.

Here’s what I’m doing: buying up and ordering copies of Pride Puppy and putting them in Little Libraries; working on angry letters to folks who are misrepresenting these wonderful children’s and YA books, because their claims are outrageously inaccurate and harmful (and risk harm, I fear, to the authors).

And I’m thinking a lot about how writers of all kinds can provide more support to those who are being assailed because–and maybe this is unfair of me?–I’m not hearing as much about this issue in Canada as I think we should be.

A Canadian writer’s book will be read (hopefully, with some care) by the United States Supreme Court Justices so they can determine whether children should be shielded from it. And that’s a big deal.

Here’s a not-very-legal link to someone reading Pride Puppy.

Kids need this book, and “exposing” them to it is part of providing public education in a diverse society still struggling towards equality.

And while I’m on my soapbox: removing references to transgender activities in the U.S. Parks’ website history of Stonewall? Also deeply shameful. An outrageous rewriting of history.

I’ve had past protest march slogans going through my head lately, and here’s one from about protecting old-growth forests: “What do we do? We fight back.”