Louisiana Voice

I had an uncle, James B. Aswell, Jr., who was an author back in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. His father, James B. Aswell, Sr., was the third president of Louisiana Tech and was later elected to Congress where he served from 1913 until his death in 1931.

I never had the privilege of meeting either man (Congressman Aswell died 12 years before I was born) but I do remember reading the obituary of James Jr. in The Shreveport Times in 1955, when I was 12 and I also remember reading about a book burning event in Natchitoches where copies of his book Midsummer Fires were destroyed by the fine decency-loving citizens because they protested to such vulgar literature.

Years later, I had occasion to read one of his novels. The scandalous story was of a irreverent housewife who rode horseback – Lady Godiva-style – through the streets of Lake Charles. Wow.

Even later, during my 1957-58 freshman year at Ruston High School, I remember one of my fellow band members, an older (a senior) girl, sneaking around to read Peyton Place by the late Grace Metalious. She had to sneak around because we weren’t allowed to read such filth that today would be met by a collective yawn. I kept my copy at home where I devoured page after page of the novel. (I kept it hidden under my bed along with my issues of National Geographic.)

Today, we can read more sizzling stories in our daily newspapers (remember those? They used to be thrown in our front yard by a local college student working his way through school. We would bring them inside along with the quart of milk the milkman left on the front steps.)

The point I’m trying to make here is that it is wrong to censor the written word, be it Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for its liberal use of the N-word, or the availability of books containing LGBTQ characters at the LINCOLN PARISH LIBRARY.

But all that matters little to a few hypocritical types in my hometown. At a recent library board meeting ostensibly called to discuss the library budget, tempers flared over the availability of LGBTQ books that critics said contained suggestive sexual themes.

I suppose sexual-themed passages in heterosexually-oriented books (and they are in abundance, I can assure you) are acceptable. I have one word to describe those people: hypocrites.

We mature in our beliefs and prejudices by exposure to opposing viewpoints. Or at least we should. To refuse to do so is hypocritical and goes against the teachings of Christ, the very one in whose very name many would-be censors purport to speak.

If we were to accept the pseudo-Christians’ condemnation of everything we don’t understand, there would exist no such story of Jesus and the woman at the well (John 4:4-26) in the Bible.

I was once of that mindset of rejecting everything that I did not, would not accept. Again, going back to my RHS days, there was a student with whom I had been friends since our grammar school days at the old Hillcrest Elementary School across the dirt street from Midwest Dairies. But in high school, he came out and we just could not accept a gay in our midst. We (my friends and I) turned on him with a vengeance and I’m convinced we were instrumental in his decision to drop out of school his junior year.

Looking back, it’s probably the one thing I’ve done in my life that embarrasses me the most and causes me the most shame. He was a decent human being who experienced the same emotions, the same hurts, the same hopes and dreams for the future as the best – and worst – of us. And we made life miserable for him. It was an inexcusable, immature, unforgiveable thing to do and I will forever regret that I was a part of it.

Obviously, I didn’t listen very well as a teenager, but my grandfather taught me that every person I meet is a potential friend until that person shows me that he/she doesn’t want to be (“You can be friends with anyone as long as you know who they are,” he once admonished me after I questioned his friendship with a certain unsavory character). He also taught me to rob a person of their dignity. Today, though I still fall short in my efforts, I do my utmost to subscribe to those two principles.

I am no less heterosexual today than I ever was, but without exposure to different cultures and different viewpoints, I might still cling to the thought of myself as somehow superior to another person who is not an incarnation of Satan himself, just different.

What’s next after you pull those books? What else might offend your sensibilities? Publications about slavery and injustices suffered by Blacks? Books about wrongful convictions of the innocent? Overcrowding of prisons because of harsh punishment enacted by “law and order” politicians for minor offenses? What about books that document American genocide, aka the near-eradication of Native Americans? Everything critical of any political viewpoint you happen not to share? Perhaps a certain cookbook because you happen to not like broccoli?

Gambling is supposed to be a sin but I bet some of those same ones in such a lather over the availability of such books have visited Las Vegas or at least a casino in Shreveport, New Orleans or Mississippi. (And we’re not even going to talk about lying and cheating or fudging on taxes or [gasp] extramarital affairs.)

To those fine people in Ruston (and I probably know a few of them, though I’ve been gone for 40 years now) who would rid the Lincoln Parish Library of all books they find offensive to their fine, Christian values, I would suggest you pull out your Bible and read Matthew 7:1-3.