As many of us will recall, over the past few years classical literature, such as “Huckleberry Finn”, have been censored or banned for one reason or another.
In Huck’s case it was due to racial profiling or the use of the racist N-word. The battle for and against this historical tale has been fought and since then laid to rest for now, but who would have thought that even “the” great detective himself would be subjected to the same fate.
A few days ago a middle school in Virginia banned the very first tale of Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved Sherlock Homes books, “A Study in Scarlet.” The second I was told about this I smashed the palm of my hand to my forehead, but not just for the simple banning of Holmes. What really got my goat, and what may get yours, was on what grounds said banning took place. The book depicted a religion in a poor manner. To be specific, the Mormon religion.
Usually when it comes down to banning something for religious matters you’d expect an upset parent or child to be the root of the argument, but on the contrary. The once middle school, now high school students, stood up to keep the book in their libraries. One of these 20 students, as I quote the National Time article, said it was the best book he’s ever read.
More power to them. To make things worse, the board is “discussing” allowing the book to hold its place in the high school’s libraries.
There are a list of problems I can see with shoving Holmes in the trash, one of the biggest being freedom of press, which does in fact include novels of all genres.
The other reason this act is ludicrous is simply because destroying or locking away something you don’t like or understand is ignorant if not unnecessary.
The members of the Albemarle County School Board, as well as the public in general, simply had to tolerate the books existence, but instead jumped the gun.
To be fair, the accusations have been proven true.
The book seems to make out Mormons to be sneaky, conniving murderers hell bent on keeping their faith pure and strong.
So yes, this one book does pick on Mormonism. But consider this:
Why should something of such historical and entertaining worth be banned for cracking down on religion, when most comedians make a living off this, and a portion of the public are no more tolerant?
And yes, I can understand wanting to take something as violent as a murder story out of the grasp of 10 year olds, to an extent.
This is not the topic at hand.
It’s funny though, but years ago while Doyle was still around, he and his family were invited to a luncheon at the University of Utah, a Mormon based university no less, where he expressed his gratitude to the town for being treated so respectably.
So why is he being chastized?
For now it’s not a national crisis and perhaps not even a state wide one, but as the saying goes “today Europe, tomorrow the world”.
If other schools and even public libraries were to copy this act of classical jailing, then it won’t be long until all classic books, movies and more are either locked away or burned due to unsavory content.
Not only that, but isn’t the idea for schools to encourage all kinds of reading no matter what the age?
Its times like this that makes the world a dark place.
So much so that I won’t be surprised if the editor was to find this article as a mismatch of letters, and unreadable nonsense because, frankly, I’ve gone blind.