With the greatest of respect to the Minister, this begs the real issue which is who determines community norms. A particular section of a particular community had a particular interpretation of these texts which it regarded as against its values. Fair enough. But This was not the only conceivable interpretation of this text, yet the NLB for reasons that have not yet been coherently or convincingly explained chose to privilege this particular interpretation over all other possible interpretations. What if a section of some other community complained that, say, The Chronicles of Narnia had a Christian sub-text (which it does because the author C S Lewis told us so) which they found offensive to its values? Every text is always subject to multiple interpretations and every interpretation could be offensive to some community or some section of some community. The NLB will tie itself into knots trying to reconcile the different demands of different sections of different communities. It is no part of any librarys role to promote community values or any type of value except the pursuit of knowledge. There are other institutions that can legitimately do this. The culture wars that have affected other societies are upon us. This us unfortunate but a reality. Instead of denying reality -- as this and other explanations given so far have done --we should deal with it as we have dealt with other sensitive issues like race, language and religion. To do so governmental institutions like the NLB must remain strictly neutral. This decision by NLB has compromised its neutrality and the government as a whole should not compound the mistake. The situation is not yet in my view irretrievable, but it could easily become so.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 10:14:59 +0000
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