Censorship News Articles

After years of controversy, the House has overwhelmingly voted $98 million for the National Endowment of the Arts.

In 1995, President Clinton issued an executive order to declassify Government documents older than 25 years.

The Modern Library's list of the 100 greatest English-language novels of the century bears out what we've always known—when it comes to reading, the censors don't discriminate.

Congress wants to bleet out the A-word from any international group that receives U.S. family planning funds. The legislation, HR 1757--also known as the Global Gag Rule--has passed both houses of Congress and now requires the President's action.

"I hate to shock anyone, but teens are having sex." So said Jeremy Meyers, a 19 year-old high school student, at the Sex and Censorship seminar sponsored by NCAC in June. Meyers, creator of a website about books for gay and lesbian youth, spoke on a panel discussion of Sex and Censorship: Dangers to Minors and Others?

In 1995, President Clinton issued an executive order to declassify Government documents older than 25 years. Since then, more than 400 million pages of documents have been made public - more than the government had declassified in all the preceding years combined, according to Steven Aftergood, Director of the Project on Government Secrecy.

As we go to press, the Supreme Court, on June 25, upheld the "decency" standard for federal grants to the arts, which requires the NEA to take into account "general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public" when making grants.

We usually reserve this space to reprint an article of special interest that has appeared elsewhere. This time, we're printing a shortened version of a letter to us because the issue raised by eighth-grade English teacher Gina Corsun, of Edison, New Jersey, is so compelling. 

Eighth grade students in Tiverton, Rhode Island, must have been baffled when their teacher asked them to give back copies of Go Ask Alice in the middle of a class discussion, on orders from a principal who had not read the book.

Reinstatement of the Terrence McNally play, Corpus Christi, by the Manhattan Theater Club, after its cancellation, lifted a cloud from New York's cultural horizon but threats to creative expression persist elsewhere.

Abortion, contraception, homosexuality and masturbation are words that aren't discussed in New York City's Community School District 24. The Board adopted a policy in 1987 to delete those words from curriculum materials.

NCAC Censorship News Issue #69: This article by Dave Marsh, author of 50 Ways to Fight Censorship, is excerpted from the January 27 issue of the New York Daily News. It's hard to say what's most ludicrous about the push...for a rock-concert ratings system. But since we have to start dismantling the false premises of this bad joke somewhere, we [...]

A controversy is raging over a Boston Magazine headline for an article about Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates that read, "Head Negro in Charge." The phrase, which according to magazine sources is sometimes used among blacks themselves, was deemed racist by many in the context of a magazine whose readers are primarily white (by Miles Unger, managing editor, Art New England, reprinted from June/July 1998 issue).

After years of acrimonious debate in Congress, the Supreme Court will decide whether the government can set "standards of decency" (NEA v. Finley). In 1996, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower federal court decision and ruled that it cannot.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision affirming that free speech principles apply online as well as in print (Reno v. ACLU), summit meetings are convened, industry representatives rushed to develop blocking technology, government regulators have flexed their muscles, and school and library boards have initiated restrictive Internet policies.

What do filters for the Internet, removal of teen magazines, and protests about rock lyrics have in common?

NCAC is organizing a panel for participating organizations and others interested in the related topics of TV ratings and Internet filters. The lunchtime panel, to be held in New York City, is slated for March 10, 1998. TV networks, with the exception of NBC, recently broadened their "voluntary" ratings system from age-based to content-based, in an effort to avoid government-mandated [...]

NCAC Censorship News Issue #67:   Fall 1997 Actions by officials in San Antonio, TX and Mecklenburg, NC to bar funding for the arts speak volumes about the likely result nationwide had the House proposal to substitute block grants for federal funds been approved. San Antonio's city council cut funding for the arts by 15% and defunded the Esperanza Peace [...]

NCAC Censorship News Issue #67 The Arts Under Attack: Firefighters in Pennsylvania Put Out Art Show   Fall 1997 Pressured by the Chairman of the local Board of Commissioners, volunteer firefighters in Annville, PA unilaterally revised their contract with community artists who rented the fire hall for an art exhibition in early September. After Commissioner Alan Yingst decided, without viewing [...]

NCAC Censorship News Issue #67: The Arts Under Attack: The Arts Under Attack: Jock Sturges Photos Vandalized in Bookstores   Fall 1997 A new collection of photographs by Jock Sturges has become a magnet for protestors who have descended on Barnes and Noble and Borders Bookstores in at least 20 sites around the country, demanding the book's removal for its [...]

NCAC Censorship News Issue #67: The Arts Under Attack: Sculptor Fights City Hall and Wins   Fall 1997 Internationally-known artist Paul Goreniuc didn't cave in when city officials in San Jose, CA threatened him with $2500-a-day fines for failing to remove his outdoor sculpture, Space Dance for Peace IV, from the front lawn of his own home. The 12-foot high [...]

NCAC Censorship News Issue #67: The Arts Under Attack: The Philly Flasher Succumbs to Censors in Tennessee   Fall 1997 Frontal nudity in art, especially male, even of children and even in a non-sexual context, offends some viewers in degrees ranging from discomfort to actual revulsion. Others can appreciate such images for their aesthetic qualities or lack thereof and can [...]

NCAC Censorship News Issue #67: Fall 1997

NCAC Censorship News Issue #66: Summer 1997 As the controversy over the new tv ratings system heats up, so does the question of whether government initiated ratings comprise censorship and if the Federal Communications Commission can limit free speech. Dissatisfied with the "voluntary" ratings system developed by the television and entertainment industries, Congress initiated proposals to impose a government-sanctioned rating [...]

Censorship News #66

NCAC Censorship News Issue #66: Summer 1997 In a stunning rebuke to overzealous prosecutors, the owner and manager of Bellingham, Washington's Newstand store were awarded $1.3 million for prior restraint and for retaliatory prosecution by a U.S. District Court in Seattle. The judgment was awarded to Ira Stohl and Kristina Hjelsand, who had been charged with obscenity for selling a [...]

NCAC Censorship News Issue #67:

by Joan E. Bertin

Here we go again. A parent complains about a book used in her son's reading class, so the superintendent takes it off the reading list. This happened even though the book has earned praise from librarians and educators, the teacher thinks it's a good teaching tool, a faculty committee agreed with that judgment, and most of the kids like it.

Groups and individuals have long campaigned against overzealous government classification of documents in the name of "national security," for impeding the interchange of ideas about government actions and policies that are necessary to a democratic society.

NCAC Censorship News Issue #65: Much discussion about the Internet focuses on its purported dangers to children, with little attention to its value as an educational and informational resource. In an Orwellian bit of legal reasoning, the Justice Department now argues before the Supreme Court that the federal law restricting "indecent" material on the Internet is necessary to protect free [...]

In a decision that affirms the right of students to learn, the Colorado Court of Appeals ordered the Jefferson County School Board to reinstate the high school teacher they had fired for teaching Bertolucci's film, 1900.

NCAC Censorship News Issue #68: Winter 1997-1998 The challenge to New York City's new zoning law has now reached the Court of Appeals, New York's highest court (Hickerson v. NYC). The ordinance restricts access to adult entertainment establishments—bookstores, video stores, theaters and clubs devoted to sexually explicit but constitutionally protected fare. The legislation is troubling because it is broad enough [...]

NCAC Executive Director Leanne Katz, addressing the Hofstra University Symposium on Law and the Arts in October, expressed concern that some legal academics may be contributing to the worsening climate for the arts in this country.

Artist Robyn Bellospirito's work, including three contested paintings, was displayed at the Manhasset, New York library in 1996. The exhibit had been cancelled in 1993 for violating the library's "no nudes" policy.

Rather than allow 5th and 6th graders to read about the Big Bang theory in Discovery Works, a Silver, Burdett and Ginn science textbook, the school superintendent in Marshall County, KY had the offending pages glued together.

There seems to be a strange campaign afoot to remove the S-word from our lexicon. Its perpetrators seem to believe that if no one mentions "it," adolescents won't know or think about it and therefore, won't engage in it.

NCAC Censorship News Issue #64:

Rib Lake High School in Wisconsin is in trouble again. Rib Lake is where censorship actions surrounding Judy Blume's book Forever resulted in a costly judgment (Dishnow v. Rib Lake) against the district (Censorship News 62).

High school teacher Cissy Lacks was awarded $750,000 by a federal court in a case against a suburban St. Louis school district. Lacks was fired by the Ferguson-Florissant Schools for failing to censor her 11th grade students' creative expression as part of a creative writing assignment in which she asked them to write as they speak. (A federal judge reinstated Lacks in August.)

President Clinton signed the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, which bans the production and sale of sexually explicit material depicting people who "appear to be" children.