In “Areopagitica,” John Milton notes that if books corrupt, then the censors would be the most corrupt citizens in the land.
I read with amusement and sadness the Oct. 9 front-page article “A brigade of objectors,” about Jennifer Petersen, who wages a zealous campaign to keep books she finds objectionable out of school libraries. The ironies abound. According to the article, Ms. Petersen keeps 73 inappropriate-for-school books in her basement. She has flagged and typed up excerpts from around 1,300 pages of those books to use as evidence that the books should vanish from school libraries.
Ms. Petersen has apparently found a hobby that she enjoys, but, because she majored in psychology, she might want to turn some of her attention away from the books to interrogate her own obsession. Indeed, one has to wonder why she keeps in her basement, with her son and daughter living overhead, the very books that she deems dangerous for young readers. In the words of Wanda Sykes, “Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ I think you’re focusing on the wrong s—-.”