Sleepless nights

A Bentonville, Arkansas, man is demanding that the local public library fire its director, censor a book, and pay him $20,000. (from The Morning News : Local News for Northwest Arkansas)

You see, his two teenage sons, while righteously looking for books on military academies (Dewey call # 355), accidentally stumbled across The Whole Lesbian Sex Book (Dewey call # 613.9) and, in all innocence, read it by accident, with terrible results.

Adams said his 14- and 16-year-old sons, (names omitted by this blogger), looked at the book while the 14-year-old was browsing for material on military academies. He requested the city pay him $10,000 per child, the maximum allowed under the Arkansas obscenity law.

"My sons were greatly disturbed by viewing this material and this matter has caused many sleepless nights in our house," he said in another e-mail to McCaslin earlier in February.

Disturbed boys. Sleepless nights. Hm.

I suppose it's one way to cash in. It could be rather profitable, this business of being professionally shocked by things that your teenage boys "accidentally" find in the society around them. Just wait 'til they discover the internet!

Amid all the hilarity at sites like Snopes, the truly disturbing fact that a well-reviewed, useful, and by all accounts non-prurient nonfiction reference book is being censored and will not be available to anyone who needs that information, either for personal reasons or for academic or medical reasons, seems to be escaping everybody's attention.