I’m of the opinion that book bans are foolish, and I went into
the reasons why in my post of January 30, 2022.
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2022/01/
Two of the many books that are banned are “Slaughterhouse Five”
and “The Handmaid’s Tale”. “Slaughterhouse 5” was the class project in an English
class I was monitoring recently, and “The Atlantic” recently published an
interview with Margaret Atwood, who explained her thought process about “The Handmaid’s
Tale.
Naturally, I put both of them on hold at the local library,
and “The Handmaid’s Tale” came in this morning.
The irony of “The Handmaid’s Tale” is that the states where
women are more likely to live lives depicted in the book are more likely to ban
the book, and Texas (which has banned the most books) is the poster child for
this phenomenon. (The state has banned 801 books in 22 districts).
You’re likely aware of the story of Kate Cox, whose story is
posted below:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/12/texas-abortion-ken-paxton-kate-cox
When a Texas court ruled
that a 31-year-old woman with a non-viable pregnancy could have an abortion
despite the state’s strict bans, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton,
responded with a brazen threat to prosecute “hospitals, doctors, or anyone
else” who would assist in providing the procedure. The letter he sent Texas
hospitals hours after the ruling, threatening first-degree felonies that could result in life in
prison, was a “stunning” move indicative of his longstanding crusade to
criminalize abortion care, say legal experts and advocates.
“It is extraordinary that Paxton would threaten hospitals and doctors with this letter before even winning an appeal,” Mary Ziegler, a UC-Davis law professor who focuses on reproductive rights, told the Guardian. “It’s a very unusual maneuver, but does certainly reflect his ultimate goal of wanting to go after abortion providers and supporters at all costs.”
After Paxton sent his menacing letter to Texas hospitals, the state petitioned the all-Republican Texas supreme court to block the ruling allowing Kate Cox to access an abortion in Texas. On Friday, the state’s highest court temporarily halted the lower court order that had allowed Cox to receive emergency abortion care, before ruling on Monday to vacate the order that would have permitted her to get care in her home state.
With a risky pregnancy that threatened her health, Cox waited nearly three days for the court to issue a final order. On Monday, hours before the final order from the court, she finally fled out-of-state for abortion care at 20 weeks pregnant.
Cox’s attorneys called Paxton’s strategy a “fearmongering”
tactic and an effort to “bulldoze the legal system” to ensure Cox continued to
suffer.
Her case underscores the aggressive nature of the state’s
top attorney when it comes to not only enforcing a ban on abortion even in dire
circumstances, but creating a climate of fear around abortion that targets
providers.
“Ken Paxton was trying to say who the judge’s emergency
order protected or didn’t protect – but he doesn’t actually have the authority
to do that,” said Joanna Grossman, professor at the Southern Methodist
University Dedman School of Law in Dallas. “His behavior here is a continuation
of what he’s been doing for the past three years and beyond – and that is
enforcement through fear. His MO is to make threats, be a bully, and scare
people and providers out of abortion access. The actual legal rules aren’t as
important to him.”
Backed by the state’s major anti-abortion groups, Paxton
has cemented himself as a staunch anti-abortion advocate since his tenure as a
Texas house and senate representative, and even more so as attorney general
starting in 2015, from which position he has zealously litigated against abortion rights and openly celebrated the fall of Roe v Wade.
Paxton’s support and defense of 2021’s Senate Bill 8 – a
near-total abortion ban that empowers private citizens to sue those who “aid or
abet” care – helped create a chilling effect among abortion providers, who
stopped providing care months before the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe,
out of fear of threats to their livelihoods. The attorney general has also
successfully sued the Biden administration to fight against
protections for Texas physicians who perform abortions in emergency
circumstances.
And his office is currently battling a legal challenge that seeks to clarify the medical exceptions in Texas abortion law for
doctors who say that the law is so vague that their hands are tied even in
major emergencies.
Filed by 20 women who have faced often severe pregnancy
complications – including near-death circumstances – as a result of being
denied emergency abortions, the case is now before the Texas supreme court,
which granted Paxton’s recent appeal.
In 2022, shortly after the US supreme court’s reversal of
Roe v Wade and a month before a law banning abortions in almost all
circumstances was slated to take effect in Texas, Paxton began to sharpen his
aim at providers by issuing an advisory encouraging – and vowing assistance to –
local prosecutors who pursue criminal charges against abortion doctors with a
potential prison sentence of up to five years, writing that providers could be
immediately held “criminally liable”, under an antiquated Texas statute.
“It was a shot across the bow to abortion doctors and
supporters,” said Blake Rocap, director of the Sissy Farenthold Reproductive
Justice Defense Project at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at
the UT-School of Law. “Historically, Paxton’s been a foot soldier in the march
to criminalizing care. That’s been the aim all along for him.”
Dr Ghazaleh Moayedi can speak directly to experiencing fear
of prosecution by Paxton. Along with a number of abortion funds, she filed suit against Paxton last year to obtain
legal protections after the attorney general indicated he could prosecute
people who help Texans access abortions out of state. At the time, Moayedi, who
had been traveling to states like Kansas to provide abortion care after Texas’s
law took effect, stopped seeing patients from Texas, because she was frightened
by the threat of possible jail time.
“The state has been coordinating these efforts against us
for a long time,” she said in reference to Cox’s case. “It is exhausting to be
constantly vigilant, especially when I know I’m a good doctor. The case reminds
us that we could still be put in the crosshairs. It continues to worry me.”
Ken Paxton’s 61st birthday is tomorrow. If I knew
his address, I would send him a dead fish wrapped in a newspaper to help him
celebrate his day.
Back to “The Handmaid’s Tale” ….
Here is Margaret Atwood’s full interview in “The Atlantic”
“It’s shunning time in Madison County,
Virginia, where the school board recently banished my novel The
Handmaid’s Tale from the shelves of the high-school library. I have
been rendered “unacceptable.” Governor Glenn Youngkin enabled such censorship
last year when he signed legislation allowing parents to veto teaching
materials they perceive as sexually explicit.
This episode is perplexing to me, in
part because my book is much less sexually explicit than the Bible, and I doubt
the school board has ordered the expulsion of that. Possibly, the real motive lies
elsewhere. The conservative Christian group Focus on the Family generated the list of “unacceptable” books
that reportedly inspired the school board’s action, and at least one member of
the public felt the school board was trying to “limit what kids can read” based
on religious views. Could it be that the board acted under the mistaken belief
that The Handmaid’s Tale is anti-Christian?
The truth is that the inspiration
for The Handmaid’s Tale is in part biblical: “Beware of false prophets, who come to
you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves” (Matthew 7:15).
The novel sets an inward faith and core Christian values—which I take to be
embodied in the love of neighbor and the forgiveness of sins—against
totalitarian control and power-hoarding cloaked in a supposed religiousness
that is mostly based on the earlier scriptures in the Bible. The stealing of
women for reproductive purposes and the appropriation of their babies appears
in Genesis 30, when Rachel and Leah turn their “handmaids” over to Jacob
and then claim the children as their own. My novel is also an exploration of
the theoretical question “What kind of a totalitarianism might the United
States become?” I suggest we’re beginning to see the real-life answer to that
query.
Read: The banned books you haven’t heard about
Wittingly or otherwise, the Madison
County school board has now become part of the centuries-old wrangling over who
shall have control of religious texts and authority over what they mean. In its
early-modern form, this power struggle goes back to the mid-15th-century
appearance of the Gutenberg printing press, which allowed a wider dissemination
of printed materials, including Bibles.
The Church had good reason for wanting to limit
Bible-reading (in Latin) to the clergy. Limbo and purgatory weren’t in it, nor
was the catalog of saints or the notion of marriage as a sacrament, among other
key teachings. But John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, and their continental
counterparts translated the Bible into vernacular languages and enabled cheap
copies of it to be printed. As people learned to read in ever larger numbers,
they read the Bible, and the result was a proliferation of different interpretations.
Baptists, Lutherans, Calvinists, Presbyterians, Mennonites, and Methodists are
all the descendants of this biblical big bang. Approximately three centuries of
bitter and destructive religious wars followed, as well as massacres,
excommunications, widespread heresy trials, witchcraft panics, and burnings at
the stake, with the usual nasty human-warfare raping, looting, and pillaging
stuff thrown in.
That’s one reason the authors of the United States Constitution
framed the First Amendment as they did. It stipulates that Congress shall not
make any law that establishes a state religion or prohibits the free exercise
of an individual’s own faith. Who wanted the homicidal uproar that had gone on
in Europe for so long?
That uproar resulted from the collision between an old
establishment and a new communication technology. All such collisions are
disruptive, especially at first, when the new technology bears an aura of magic
and revelation. Would Adolf Hitler have had the same impact without radio? As
for film, it was such a powerful and potentially bad influence on the masses
that it inspired Hollywood’s Hays Code. This list of prohibitions was very
long, and included depictions of mixed-race marriages and scenes in which a man
and a woman were shown in bed together, even if married. (This last produced a
boom in twin-bed sales, because viewers got the idea that this was the norm in
a marriage.)
The effort to control lurid comic books came next. Donald Duck was
one thing; crime and horror were quite another. The latter included much
material that was banned under the Hays Code, and teens of my generation read
them avidly. On-screen, Singin’ in the Rain;
under the bed, Tales From the Crypt.
Series such as Crime Does Not Pay were
said to encourage juvenile delinquency, not to mention racism. Some of these
comics were certainly traumatizing: Will I ever recover from the slimy, toothy
monster rising out of the eerie lagoon? Probably not.
Then along came television. Marshall McLuhan, pioneer of media
studies, said that John F. Kennedy won his debates against Richard Nixon thanks
to TV: Nixon’s 5 o’clock shadow didn’t transmit well. Then there was Elvis the
Pelvis and his Ed Sullivan Show appearance,
which encouraged widespread rock and rolling. I was 16 at the time, and
therefore right in the middle of that particular frenzy. Later, the televising
of anti-Vietnam protest rallies and riots sparked more of them, giving us the
’60s. And today, it’s the internet and social-media platforms—so disruptive!
Add streaming services, which permit written works too long and
complex to be squashed easily into a 90-minute film to appear as ongoing
series. One of these is The Handmaid’s Tale.
So, yes, today’s self-appointed moral gatekeepers can exclude my novel from
school libraries, thus making it impossible for students who can’t afford to
buy it to read it for free—but as for shutting down the story completely, I’m
afraid that horse has left the barn. Has anyone told Madison County about
BookTok? That’s the part of TikTok where young people recommend books to one
another. Added together, hashtags of my name and The Handmaid’s Tale have about 400 million
BookTok mentions. Sorry about that.
I did intend my book for adult readers, who would recognize
totalitarianism when they saw it. But it’s very hard to control what young
people get their hands on, especially if they’re told something is too old for
them, or too evil, or too immoral. What was I doing reading Peyton Place on top of the garage roof
when I was 16? Incest! Rape! Varicose veins! The incest and the rape weren’t
news to me—they were in the Bible—but varicose veins? The Bible says nothing
about them, so that was a shocker.
Here, I would point out that attempts
to control media content are as likely to come from the so-called left as from
the so-called right, each side claiming to act in the name of the public good.
Stalin’s U.S.S.R. and Mao’s China went in for a mind-boggling level of
censorship, but it was all for “the people,” and who could be against that? Or
against the protection of the innocent? Sometimes, these things get started out
of a genuine need and concern, but a takeover by some bureaucratic version of
the Inquisition is very likely to follow. Most of us are more easily
manipulated by our desire to do good, or to be seen to do good, than by the
temptation to do evil, at least in public view. Hence “virtue signaling.”
Freedom of expression is a hot
potato—freedom for whom and for what, and who decides? The last English writer
before the late 20th century to have totally free rein was Geoffrey Chaucer.
Few then could read, and books were hand-lettered and very expensive, so
Chaucer could diss the clergy, use four-letter words and religious swearing,
and describe salacious and ribald incidents, because his work would have no
effect on the body politic. However, by the time of Shakespeare’s theater—an
early mass-entertainment medium—a state censor had been installed. That’s why
Shakespeare’s characters have to be so inventive with their cursing, and why so
many plays are set in the past, and in distant locations such as Venice. This
trend continued: The licensing of plays and books in the name of public
morality explains much about the 19th-century novel. Sex by implication, but
not on the page. Officially, no obscenity, no sedition, no blasphemy. Nothing
that would bring a blush to the cheek of an innocent maiden (though there was a
great deal of illicit porn).
Which brings us back to Christianity
and the supposed bias against it in The Handmaid’s Tale. Christianity is
now so broad a term that it means little. Are we talking about Greek Orthodoxy?
Antinomianism? Mormonism? Liberation theology? The Salvation Army, dedicated to
helping the helpless? Sojourners, a social-fairness movement? A Rocha, an
eco-organization that is firmly Christian? (I happen to be a fan of these last
two.) Incidentally, Jesus is not particularly pro-family. “If anyone comes to
Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and
sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26).
That’s a difficulty for any pro-family Christian group, you must admit. (Should
these words of Jesus be censored? Just wondering.)
Should parents have a say in what
their kids are taught in public schools? Certainly: a democratic vote on the
matter. Should young people—high-school juniors and seniors, for starters—also
have a say? Why not? In many states, if they’re over 16, they can be married
(with parental approval); if of reproductive age, which might be 10, they can
give birth, and may be forced to. So why should they, too, not be allowed an
opinion?
The outward view of the Madison County
school board is that people ages 16 to 18 are too young to explore such
questions. I don’t know what its inner motives may be. Possibly, it has a
public-spirited aim. It may have noted the falling birth rate and the surveys
showing that young people are losing interest in sex. No sex equals no babies,
unless everyone resorts to test tubes. Has sex become too readily available?
Banal, even? A boring chore? If so, what better way to make it fascinating
again than to prohibit all mention of it? Don’t read about sex! Don’t
think about sex! See no sex, hear no sex, speak no sex! Suddenly, the
kids want to explore! “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is
pleasant” (Proverbs 9:17). If that’s the school board’s game,
well played! Virginia may even get more babies out of it.
How dare I question the school board’s
motives? I do dare. After all, it has questioned mine."
Well said, Margaret.
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