THINK ON THESE – To ban or not to ban

Let’s talk about censorship.  But let’s hear it first from the experts. “Censorship, like charity,” American representative and playwright Clare Booth Luce once remarked, “should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there.”  
If you care to know, she was the wife of Henry Robinson Luce, the American magazine magnate who was called “the most influential private citizen in the America of his day.”
Henry Steele Commager has this to say: “The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion… In the long run, it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.”
Censorship is defined as “supervision and control of the information and ideas that are circulated among the people within a society.”  In modern times, censorship refers to the examination of books, periodicals, plays, films, television and radio programs, news reports, and other communication media for the purpose of altering or suppressing parts thought to be objectionable or offensive.
“The objectionable material may be considered immoral or obscene, heretical or blasphemous, seditious or treasonable, or injurious to the national security,” comments Prof. Milton Konvitz, the American author of The Constitution and Civil Rights and Fundamental Liberties of a Free People.  “Thus, the rationale for censorship is that it is necessary for the protection of three basic social institutions: the family, the church, and the state.”
Until recently, censorship was firmly established in various institutional forms in even the most advanced democratic societies.  By the mid-20th century a revolutionary change in social attitudes and societal controls weakened the existence and strength of censorship in many democracies; however, all forms of censorship have not been universally eliminated.  “Today many persons, including some civil libertarians, object to the ‘new permissiveness’ in the arts and mass media; they claim it debases the public taste, corrupts all sense of decency and civility, and even undermines civilization,” writes Prof. Konvitz.
Censorship and the ideology supporting it go back to ancient times. Every society has had customs, taboos, or laws by which speech, play, dress, religious observance, and sexual expression were regulated.
In Athens, where democracy first flourished, Socrates preferred to sacrifice his life rather than accept censorship of his teachings. Charged with the worship of strange gods and with the corruption of the youth he taught, Socrates defended free discussion as a supreme public service. He was thus the first person to formulate a philosophy of intellectual freedom.
However, it was his disciple Plato who became the first philosopher to formulate a rationale for intellectual, religious, and artistic censorship.  Plato believed that art should be subservient to morality; art that could not be used to inculcate moral principles should be banned.  In the ideal state outlined in The Republic, censors would prohibit mothers and nurses from relating tales considered bad or evil; and in his Laws Plato proposed that wrong beliefs about God or the hereafter be treated as crimes and that formal machinery be set up to suppress heresy.
In Rome the general attitude was that only persons in authority, particularly members of the Senate, enjoyed the privilege of speaking freely.  Public prosecution and punishment, supported by popular approval, occurred frequently. The emperor Caligula ordered an offending writer to be burned alive, and Nero deported his critics and burned their books.
“The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time,” Joseph Lewis commented at one time.
In AD 313 the Roman emperor Constantine the Great decreed toleration of Christianity. Twenty years later, Constantine the Great set the pattern of religious censorship that was to be followed for centuries by ordering the burning of all books by the Greek theologian Arius.  “The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame,” Oscar Wilde pointed out.
Claude Adrein Helvetius stated factly: “To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.”  To which Walt Whitman added: “The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.”
Until recently, there are still several books banned from the reading public.  Raymond Briggs’ Father Christmas (1979) was removed from all elementary classrooms in Holland, Michigan when several parents “complained that it portrayed Santa Claus as having a negative attitude toward Christmas.”  Education officials who accused it of being “racist” and “sexist” removed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain from school libraries in London.  Copies of The Living Bible by William Boyer were burned in Gastonia, North Carolina because this version was “a perverted commentary of the King James version.” 
In the United States, the film industry has for many years practiced a form of self-censorship.  In the 1920s, responding to public demands for strong controls, the Motion Picture Association of America imposed on its constituents a Production Act; compliance with its standards gave a movie a seal of approval.  A system of film classification was begun in 1968 and has been revised several times since then.  Films are given ratings, as follows: G (general audiences), PG (parental guidance advised), PG-13 (may not be suitable for preteens), R (persons under age 17 not admitted unless accompanied by parent or adult guardian), and NC-17 (persons under age 17 not admitted; replaced the X rating in 1990).
As in all previous history, the 21st century freedom from censorship has been the exception in the world. The rule has been, and continues to be, repression, suppression, and oppression. It may, however, be considered a sign of political and social progress that, everywhere in the world, at least lip-service is paid to the ideal of liberty, and that no country brazenly admits that it is committed to a policy of religious, intellectual, artistic, or political censorship.
To end this piece, allow me to quote the words of Kenneth Tynan.  He said, “Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship.”