Banned Books Week September 25-October 2, 2010

Of all of the challenges recorded by the American Library Association and the Office of Intellectual Freedom each year, the majority are directed towards children's books.

For Banned Books Week, I'm reading And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, a cute little picture book about a same sex penguin couple raising an egg together in New York's Central Park Zoo.

At issue here is  censorship. It's perfectly fine to decide that you don't want your children to read a book about homosexuality or same sex parenting. What is not okay, and what challenges are about, is seeking to remove those books from the libraries so that MY children cannot read them.

The one thing that people seem to get stuck on is 'appropriate to age group.' This challenge is often trying to get racy topics removed from certain sections in the library. Such as moving a book like And Tango Makes Three to the adult section or removed from school libraries altogether. The key here, though, is that "age group" refers to reading level and not content.