It's amazing what one person can take away

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By JAN GLIDEWELL

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 5, 2001

Why does it take a lot of people to get something done, but only one person -- usually unnamed -- to get something undone? Within a few days recently one student managed to get a middle school library in Hernando County to limit access to a book she found objectionable and one county employee managed to get two oil paintings and three postcard-sized images removed from the east Pasco government center because that employee was offended by partial nudity.

Things haven't changed a lot since a single elderly woman back in the 1970s managed to get Dade City's city manager to order a convenience store to stop selling Hustler magazine, and to get the public library in Dade City to pull several books from its shelves, one with pictures of fully clothed babies and one of them the La Leche League's breastfeeding manual.

Let us for the sake of discussion concede that the concerns expressed in this most recent spate of state-assisted prudery have some validity.

Persons visiting a government center have different expectations from those visiting a museum or an art gallery, and placing artistic judgment or First Amendment concerns in the hand of governmental administrative types is always at best a risky business.

So maybe the county was right, again, for argument's sake.

And the references to prison sex, violent and otherwise, in Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, one in a collection of Stephen King stories, might be a little on the raw side for some, if not most, middle schoolers.

Hustler, well, is Hustler, but not many people go into convenience stores looking for fine literature anyhow, and I never did figure out what that old lady had against babies and feeding them.

But, in each case, somebody in authority made a decision based on a single complaint.

Somebody sits there in an office, drawing a salary we pay for, and says, "Well, I'm in charge of the welfare of 3,000 or 4,000 or 200,000 persons and one of them is unhappy with this or that, so let's just put it away and protect the sensitivities of that one person."

It doesn't, by the way, work the other way.

If I called the Pasco County administrator's office or my local school library and complained that there was not nearly enough sexual content, profanity or violence in the paintings on the wall or the books on the shelves and demanded that somebody do something about it, they would simply hang up on me.

Or at least they always have.

In the instant cases, I managed to see the works by the Land O'Lakes artist who goes by the name MeloD as they were coming down. The "offending" paintings are part of a series springing from the artist's own experiences with domestic violence, and, the way I read it, are expressions of hope for real, romantic love -- which, like it or not, frequently takes place between persons not wearing clothes.

For all of the real obscenity of depictions of domestic violence that exists in files kept in government buildings, do we have to let a breast or two get in the way of powerful presentations of the more hopeful sides of life and love?

And I understand that some middle-schoolers might find some passages in the King story upsetting.

This wasn't assigned reading. It was a book in a library found offensive by one person who had the option of closing it and selecting another book, not involving a committee of staff, parents and students and requiring a parental permission slip for others to check it out.

I remember that my grandmother, when I was 4, had a copy of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage that she absolutely forbade me to read, ever, under any circumstances. I was much more obedient back then, and didn't actually read it until I was in my 20s and wondered why granny had books on bondage around the house.

As nearly as I can figure, she was just trying to spare me several infinitely boring hours of reading.

But as far as I know, she didn't demand that nobody else be allowed to see it.

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