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Posts tagged free speech
More on violent video game U.S. Supreme Court case
0Quote: Where do you stop? What about violent books, violent movies?
Supreme Court Justices Debate Video Game Ban
1NY Times: Justices Debate Video Game Ban
Let’s make the connection between Banned Books Week and this article.
“What’s a deviant violent video game?” asked Justice Antonin Scalia, who was the law’s most vocal opponent on Tuesday. “As opposed to what? A normal violent video game?”
“Some of the Grimm’s fairy tales are quite grim,” he added. “Are you going to ban them, too?”
“How is this any different,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked, “than what we said we don’t do in the First Amendment field in Stevens, where we said we don’t look at a category of speech and decide that some of it has low value?”
Justice Alito said the experience of playing a video game was different in kind from reading a book or seeing a movie. He described a game in which players throw their enemies into a meat grinder.
“Reading that is one thing,” he said. “Seeing it as graphically portrayed” is another thing.
“And doing it is still a third thing,” he added.
Where do you stand on content issues in new digital media?
Fighting Fire with Free Speech: Protest Book Burning on 9/11
2In what is emerging as a series on “why I became a librarian”, here’s my next blog post. I started out this series, not realizing at first what it would become, by talking about the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom’s Banned Books Week Machinima contest. As it turned out, there was a short depiction of book burning, in a video game, included in that post:
Denying people the right to freedom of speech via the burning of media is a pretty anti-American act. Libraries are constantly facing struggles in making sure that information, even information some people want to censor, is available to all.
That brings us to my 2nd post on “why I became a librarian”, and I credited a group of musicians as influencing my future career. You know who is another group of musicians who influenced many people? The Beatles. (this post happens to come on the 1-year anniversary of the release of the first Beatles video game)
How did they deal with this American opposition to their British music? They took the true ideals of America, staging protests and standing up for what is right:
And that brings us back to this post. In the most un-American way possible to remember 9/11, a pastor in Florida will burn copies of the Qu’ran.
In Chicago, the ALA will be staging a protest to this act.
Fighting Fire with Free Speech: ALA Will Protest Book Burning with 9/11 Qur’an Reading
“The librarians of America will not stand by and let ignorance rule,” says ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels. “For every would-be book burner, there are thousands of readers who will speak out for the freedom to peaceably assemble and read whatever they choose.”
Book burning is the most insidious form of book banning, and just as the American Library Association is preparing to celebrate the freedom to read during Banned Books Week, along comes one Rev. Terry Jones of the 50-member Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida. The good reverend’s idea of world outreach is to commemorate the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 with a public burning of the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book.The mind-boggling logic behind Jones’s plan has attracted the attention of Muslims and media around the world, and this morning, news sources reported that Gen. David Petraeus had personally pleaded with the reverend to restrain himself because of the potential for retaliatory violence against U.S. troops and citizens overseas that the book burning could provoke.
Meanwhile, the American Library Association and librarians across the country will move the Qur’an to the top of the Banned Books Week agenda. (Leading the way by modeling tolerance, an Oklahoma public library has been hosting an exhibit of artwork inspired by Muslim tradition.)
“Free people read freely,” says Barbara Jones, director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom. “That is a fundamental principle of the American Constitution and a basic mission of public libraries. We don’t burn books, we read them.”
Whether or not the Rev. Jones (who is no relation to ALA’s OIF director) proceeds with his plan, librarians and library advocates will assemble on the steps of the American Library Association headquarters in Chicago this Saturday at 1 p.m. for a public reading from the Qur’an to counteract the burning in Gainesville, and Banned Books Week will launch on September 25 with readings from the Qur’an.
Link to the ALA’s full post on the topic.
PLEASE HELP US HELP THE ALA SPREAD THE WORD BY TWEETING THIS LINK:
http://bit.ly/dgkn2t
This is why we became librarians, folks. Let’s stand up for Freedom of Speech.