Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

In addition to protecting our right to free speech, the First Amendment also guarantees freedom of religion, including the ability to find information on various faiths. Today, the ACLU of Eastern Missouri filed a lawsuit charging the Salem Public Library with unconstitutional censorship for blocking access to information about minority religions. In particular, information about Native American practices and Wicca were blocked because they were classified as “occult” or “criminal.”

In their press release, the ACLU justifies their action:

“The library has no business blocking these websites as “occult’ or ‘criminal” in the first place and certainly shouldn’t be making arbitrary follow-up decisions based on the personal predilections of library staff,” said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. “Public libraries should be facilitating access to educational information, not blocking it.”

Such censorship by libraries has chilling implications, as the blocking of material could be extended to impact other legitimate educational material, including comics. You can find ACLU’s official press release here.

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57 years ago today the first news of how the recently formed Comics Code Authority censored comics hit the wires, and Tim Stroup’s excellent “Today In Comics” blog has the clippings. Stroup gathers stories from five news services that covered Comics Code administrator Charles Murphy’s press conference touting the organization’s work to diminish the impact of images containing sexuality and violence within comic books.

Earlier this year the Comics Code Authority closed its doors and the CBLDF acquired the intellectual property rights to the Code’s Seal of Approval. Thus ended an era of censorship that sanitized the medium’s output, and established a stigma against comics that would endure until recent years. Dr. Amy Nyberg created a short history of the Seal of Approval for the CBLDF.

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