Banned literature gets day at library

Friday, Sept. 30, 2005 | 11:08 a.m.

Between readings of a handful of books deemed offensive, ACLU attorney Allen Lichenstein stood in a spotlight at the Flamingo Library's theater and defended access to books, newspapers, leaflets and magazines.

Since 1982, Banned Books Week has defended the freedom to choose various, unorthodox viewpoints, Lichenstein said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District have sponsored readings of banned books for seven years, said Suzanne Scott, performing arts center coordinator for the library, who organized the reading.

Some books are considered classics, others have just been recently published.

Lichenstein said Jon Stewart, Ben Karlin and David Javerbaum's best-selling satirical book, "America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction," had been banned in 2004 by the library system in Pascagoula, Miss., because it contained an image of Supreme Court judges' faces superimposed on naked bodies.

Attorney Dayvid Figler, who read exerpts from the book, said it was a parody of high school textbooks for history and civics classes.

Figler said outlandish and relevant topics are explored in such books, noting that John Roberts Jr., won confirmation as the 17th chief justice of the United States on Thursday. The confirmation process is parodied in the book.

A crowd of more than 100 people packed the theater Thursday night, many of them high school students attending "An Evening of Banned Books," a forum during Banned Books Week, which began Sept. 24 and ends Saturday.

Brian Theiroy said he was headed to the library's computer lab when he spotted a flier for the event and took a detour.

"I thought it was all right," Theiroy said after the readings.

He has read John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" and JD Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," so he was no stranger to the racial slurs, profanity and violence that can offend some readers.

"It's a travesty that you can even think about banning literature," Theiroy said.

If the government or any other organization can restrict access, "how can the First Amendment be true?" Theiroy asked.

For some, such as Clark High School junior Jennifer Sangria, attending the session brought extra credit for her English literature class.

Sangria and her friends giggled over the likes of Louise Rennison's "On the Bright Side, I'm Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God: Further Confessions of Georgia Nicholson."

The Bozeman Montana School District kept Rennison's book on its shelves in 2005 despite a complaint that an unstable person seeing a girl reading the book might think from the title that the girl is promiscuous and stalk her, Lichenstein said. "And that was just one person who complained," he said.

Another Clark High junior who attended the event, Lynn Truong, said extra credit wasn't the only reason she and some of her friends attended. They said they were there to support freedom of speech, and it wound up being an enjoyable evening, Truong said.

"I loved it," she said. Truong and other students went home with ACLU literature and library information on other banned books.