Belling on Censorship, Pornography, Love, and Romance

Mark Belling is attempting to become the most outrageous self-centered Wisconsin hypocrite. It's a touch competition, but Belling is succeeding.

This week it is A dual dose of double standards where he goes off the chart about the efforts of some of his friends to pull a book from the shelves of the West Bend Public Library. The book deals with among other things, gays. Yes, it  addresses homosexuality and the imagination of a young gay man who is beaten by thugs and his subsequent dreams or visions after he passes out.

Belling finds it pornographic.

 It all started when a pair of grandparents in the Bend found some gay porn in the children’s section of the library. The stuff was so raunchy I couldn’t even read from it on my radio program without jeopardizing WISN’s broadcast license...

The book, which Belling never identifies, is Baby Be-Bop, deemed appropriate for ages twelve and up, and is the story of the gay closeted fifteen year old.

 

Publishers Weekly :

Embroidering her prose with lushly romantic imagery, Block returns to the world of Weetzie Bat for this keenly felt story. A prequel of sorts to Weetzie Bat, the novel opens while Weetzie's best friend Dirk is still a child, lying on his mat at naptime. "Dirk had known it since he could remember" - known, that is, that he is gay. Tenderly raised by Grandma Fifi, famous for her pastries and her 1955 Pontiac convertible, Dirk struggles with love and fear: "He wanted to be strong and to love someone who was strong; he wanted to meet any gaze, to laugh under the brightest sunlight and never hide." After his first heartbreak, with his closest friend (who cannot accept Dirk's love nor his own for Dirk), Dirk battles more fiercely for identity; beaten up by a gang of punks, he slumps into semiconsciousness and is visited by his ancestors, each telling a haunting, lyrical tale of love, faith and self-acceptance. What might seem didactic from lesser writers becomes a gleaming gift from Block. Her extravagantly imaginative settings and finely honed perspectives remind the reader that there is magic everywhere. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc

 

Belling concludes

that the standard for censorship is majority rule

: "...This is what America is supposed to be all about – citizens petitioning their government to respect the public will..." I wonder if he would respect the will of a majority of Milwaukee residents if they voted him off the air?  

At that point he would start bellowing about the Constitution. For once he would be correct.

 

 

 

Comments

[germantown_kid]

Smoglin, it's comforting to learn that you are a faithful listener of Belling. Too bad none of his common sense has soaked thru your thick skull.

[Mark]

Paul:

Leave it to you to totally take comments out of context. Where did Belling EVER write that the book should be censored?

The crux of this issue is the placement of the book in a children's section. The people in question don't want the book banned, they simply asked for it to be moved to a more appropriate section.

Yet that doesn't work as well as your writing about "right-wing fanatics burning books" does it?

I looked at Amazon, and read the reviews. It says for ages 12 and up. So you think this book belongs next to Dr. Seuss?

And the more important question, about the library board attempting to subvert open records requests, are hiring outside counsel? Don't you think that's the REAL issue?

[Glenn Loos-Austin]

>The people in question don't want the book banned, they simply asked for it to be moved to a more appropriate section.

No, they asked for it to be moved to the adult section, which is almost exactly the opposite of the appropriate section for a book targeting the 12 and up crowd.

Misfiling a book is pretty close to banning it, after all. How are people supposed to find things in a library if they're routinely placed in the wrong sections?

(Suppose PETA managed to get all the cookbooks dealing with preparation of meat moved out of the cookbook section and into the shelves holding the books on wars. "In this book they talk about chopping up animals, with passages so disgusting one couldn't even read them on the air. All we're asking is for the books to be appropriately filed with other books about violence.")

Vis-a-vis the open record request: Perhaps it is correct that they should be sharing the records. I tend to think they should be, but I'm an open records kind of guy. However, they don't seem to think so, effectively putting them in dispute over a point of law. When one has a dispute over a point of law, one hires a lawyer. They can't very well use the city lawyer for this, since that's whom the dispute is with, thus outside counsel is really their only option, isn't it? Lawyers need to be paid, so they're paying him or her. That's in fact how it is supposed to work, and the overblown indignation over that aspect of this issue rings kind of ridiculous and false.

[Mark]

Adult section is the wrong place? Why not? Can't 12-year-olds find books in the library?

ANd last I checked, they used a FILING SYSTEM to look up things in the library. I know Dewey Decimal is old, but I'm pretty sure they have computers to look books up. I assume that you go into a library and just start looking for a single book by your comment.

Don't get me started about your PETA comment, they certainly want that done.

And finally, correspondence between government bodies are subject to an open records request. Serve on ANY village group and it's spelled out. The library board thinks they are above this law, and they're not. It will get struck down, and all the money will be wasted to lawyers instead of on the library.

[Glenn Loos-Austin]

> I assume that you go into a library and just start looking for a single book by your comment.

Of course not. I go into a library, then head for the section that has the kind of book I want, and look on the shelves until I find something I'm interested in. It works because the books are grouped in the right sections of the library. If some external group manages to induce the library to put the book in the wrong section, I'll never see it, and thus won't read it. Exactly the situation that people are trying to achieve here. They don't want 12 year olds to read the book, so they're trying to force the library to hide it in the wrong section. The fact that it could still be found if you were looking for it in specific is immaterial.

In short, the interests in play here are trying to game the system. They know that they can't get the library to remove the book, so they're trying for an easier target that will have the same effective result. I call shenanigans.

> Don't get me started about your PETA comment, they certainly want that done.

I know. It's idiotic. And by the logic you're applying to this, we should let them, right?