Remember Gerald Allen? The state rep from Alabama whose proposed ban on all gay-themed library books I blogged about last week? Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a post about the latest development. According to the Guardian, George Bush has just invited Mr. Allen to the White House. Because he’s interested in what Representative Allen has to say.
Let’s just pause for a moment and consider how wrong that is, shall we? First, Allen proposes a law that’s a) blatantly unconstitutional and b) hard to see as anything but a hateful swipe at gay people. And then Bush, instead of either ignoring this wingnut and his unconstitutional bill or saying “I appreciate Mr. Allen’s moral fervor, but in a free society we trust people to decide for themselves what they’re going to read, and we don’t go around banning books,” rewards the guy with a visit to the White House and a confidential chat.
This doesn’t bode well for the next four years, does it? At this point, it would not greatly surprise me if Bush were to appoint Allen to the brand-new cabinet office of Secretary Of Keeping The Uppity Homos In Their Place. So much for trying to heal the rifts in the country.
Here’s a snippet from the Guardian reporter’s interview with Allen:
Allen claims he is acting to “encourage and protect our culture”. Does “our culture” include Shakespeare? I ask Allen if he would insist that copies of Shakespeare’s sonnets be removed from all public libraries. I point out to him that Romeo and Juliet was originally performed by an all-male cast, and that in Shakespeare’s lifetime actors and audiences at the public theatres were all accused of being “sodomites”. When Romeo wished he “was a glove upon that hand”, the cheek that he fantasised about kissing was a male cheek. Next March the Alabama Shakespeare festival will be performing a new production of As You Like It, and its famous scene of a man wooing another man. The Alabama Shakespeare Festival is also the State Theatre of Alabama. Would Allen’s bill cut off state funding for Shakespeare?
“Well,” he begins, after a pause, “the current draft of the bill does not address how that is going to be handled. I expect details like that to be worked out at the committee stage. Literature like Shakespeare and Hammet [sic] could be left alone.” Could be. Not “would be”. In any case, he says, “you could tone it down”.
And by way of comparison, consider this passage from Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran :
We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works,
considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something
seemingly more urgent—namely ideology. This was a country where all
gestures, even the most private, were interpreted in political terms. …A few years ago some members of the Iranian parliament set up an
investigative committee to examine the content of national television.
The committee issued a lengthy report in which it condemned the showing
of Billy Budd, because, it claimed, the story promoted
homosexuality.
Does this sound familiar? Now we know who Gerald Allen’s spiritual kindred are. I rest my case.
This book-banning thing has clearly pushed a whole lot of my buttons. (You should have seen the first draft of this post, which contained much swearing and the phrase “crockery-smashing rage.”) I think I’ll get back to the “why read literature?” series — which, yes, actually will be more than one post long — this weekend and talk about what some of those buttons are.
See also: Maud Newton, Neil Gaiman, PZ Meyers, and the American Library Association’s official response. (Yay, ALA!)
