Neil Gaiman on Intellectual Freedom

Author Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Coraline, many others) had a recent post on his blog that talked about a recent conviction of someone for owning "obscene comics". While this has some relation to our class, I thought a link from that post to a older post was even more appropriate (and I highly recommend reading the whole post). Entitled "Why defend freedom of icky speech?", it is a long response to a fan questioning why it was worth defending the defendant in this case.

And this question reminded me of a similar question that seems to have come often over this term about what materials should be in a library's collection and if there are any materials that are just "out of line." And the answer varies between libraries, given their different focuses and collection policies. And obviously libraries concern only a subset of our First Amendment rights - there may likely be things that ought to be free to publish but that don't belong in your library due to its collection policy and the interests of patrons.

But Gaiman's older blog post had some gems of wisdom in it that are appropriate for us to consider. Why should the library have potentially offensive materials? And what about a book that offends the librarian personally? As Gaiman puts it,

You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're going to have to stand up for stuff you don't believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art.

In this case, we're talking about library collections rather than law, but I think the basic point remains the same. We allow things that we find offensive in our collections because the alternative is that we have rules to prevent "offensive" material - and those same rules would be used to remove things we do think are worth defending. "One person's obscenity is another person's art."