AL Focus has a nifty short video up with clips from Saturday’s Read-Out! Check it out!
This report from the Banned Books Read-Out!, held September 29 in Chicago, features ALA President Loriene Roy and Judith Krug from ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom speaking on the importance of choosing your own reading material, and authors Carolyn Mackler and Chris Crutcher on how librarians “save our lives daily.”
Well, it’s been an exciting and successful Banned Books Week 2007 so far. Lots of great media coverage, and the events have been terrific.
Saturday’s Read-Out! in Chicago featured wonderful weather and great readings by many of the most frequently challenged authors from 2005 and 2006, along with several Chicago celebrities.
Read coverage of the event from the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune. Here’s a photo from the Tribune article of Dr. Haki Madhabuti’s reading – we’ll have more available soon at the Banned Books Week group on Flickr, alongside the nearly 200 other photos posted by folks around the country.
More media coverage can be found in the many blogs, newspapers, and radio and TV stations covering Banned Books Week. Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and Trustee of the Freedom to Read Foundation, has an op-ed in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Dozens of libraries, colleges, and bookstores have posted information of their Banned Books Week activities on our interactive map.
The Second Life events have been fun and well attended, including the kick-off party on Saturday:
… and fireworks Sunday and Tuesday:
There was even an article in Second Life News Network!
There are more events planned for Second Life, including a program on challenges to materials on Thursday plus a pirate party in Teen Second Life on Friday. Hope you can join us!
Finally, we’d like to leave you with this comic found at the welcome center at Teen Second Life:
(Click on image to read dialogue.)
We at OIF thank those who have helped us in this celebration of everyone’s Freedom to Read!
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, Faith Center Church Evangelistic Ministries v. Glover, that affirmed a northern California library’s decision to deny a church use of its meeting rooms for religious worship services.
The Faith Center Church filed its lawsuit after the Antioch Library in Contra Costa County in California barred the church from using its meeting rooms. The library instituted the ban after the church circulated flyers inviting the public to join it at the library for religious worship. The library’s meeting room policy prohibits use of its meeting rooms for “religious services or activities.”
While the district court held that the restriction on access for “religious services” was unconstitutional, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s decision and upheld the library’s policy. The Ninth Circuit held that the library had a legitimate interest in screening and excluding meeting room activities that could interfere with the library’s primary mission of providing a quiet place for reading, and that the library could reasonably conclude that a worship service could undermine the library’s purpose of making itself available to the whole community by disrupting the library and alienating other users.
The Ninth Circuit cautioned that the library could not prohibit religious groups from engaging in other religious activities, including reading, Bible discussions, Bible instruction, praying, singing, sharing testimony, and discussing political or social issues. They noted that it would be difficult for a library to distinguish between these kinds of activities and a worship service, but when a religious group self-identifies its activity as a religious worship service, as Faith Center did in its flyers, the library could apply its policy and exclude the group from its meeting rooms.
Theresa Chmara, general counsel for the Freedom to Read Foundation, offers guidance for libraries that may be reviewing their own meeting room policies in the aftermath of this decision:
Legal counsel for the plaintiff, Faith Center Church, say the church will continue to pursue its legal remedies by asking the lower courts for a permanent injunction (the Supreme Court was asked to review a temporary injunction.)
Anyone with questions about the lawsuit or meeting room policies can call or write the Office for Intellectual Freedom for assistance. OIF can be reached at oif@ala.org or 800-545-2433, ext. 4223.
