Amazon has recently started to ban books on pedophilia to help stop child abuse. PETA saw this as an opportunity to ban other genres of books to help with the issue of animal abuse. PETA does take the issue of animal abuse to the extremes, however I do agree that there should be more of an effort to stop animal abuse. I picked up a stray cat about a year ago; she is amazingly sweet and doing just fine. Unfortunately not all strays end up in a good home and do have a possibility to get picked up by people with ill intentions.
6 comments:
Kudos on the cat-saving! That's really considerate.
I've just recently learned about PETA from our Government reading, which said that PETA is apparently a radical interest group with an illegal activity agenda to draw attention to animal abuse. I'm glad that they are protecting animals by banning books on Amazon, but I wonder if this type of behavior borders on violation of First Amendment rights?
In this day and age, First Amendment rights have become as common as pop quizzes in Government class. And in this perspective, what PETA is doing should seem ordinary. It'd be interesting to see how and the effect of PETA's lobbying.
A blog highlighting First Amendment issues:
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/
I agree with Eric Ding. As soon as I read "banning books" i immediately jumped to question if this was against the First Amendment. Another question that came to my mind was what books exactly support animal abuse? And who buys them? PETA seems to be creating a really bad case that would just get them into trouble by violating the First Amendment.
Although the banning of certain books seems like a violation of freedom of speech/press, I think whoever bans some books should be consistent and ban books that support (?) animal abuse too.
On the other hand, maybe no books should be banned because these books add depth to people's knowledge about the world, whether this knowledge is comfortable or not. On one list of banned books is As I Lay Dying, the Catcher in the Rye, and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These choices seem kind of ridiculous and since the line is nearly impossible to draw, it seems to me that maybe banning books is actually harmful. Taught correctly, these books teach people to open their mind and tolerate differences. Covering up unpleasant truths does not appear to help solve problems anyways, especially if the problem is based off of ignorance.
I would like to point out that according to the blog you linked us to only stated that PETA wants to ban guidebooks on cockfighting and dogfighting, which are illegal. Although I normally don't support PETA activities, in this case I believe that the ban is justified as it promotes illegal activity. If there was a book titled "The Art of Bank Robbery", I'm pretty sure all of us wouldn't want it on the market as to incite the participation of more bank robbers.
On the subject of book banning, plenty of books have been banned in schools. Why should Amazon be any different? Also, the First Amendment deals with the government, not individual corporations, so Amazon should be able to do what they want. If they don't want to sell a book, they don't have to sell it, just like any other bookstore.
It's good to know that a company like Amazon has the courtesy and generosity to help fight child abuse. Even though this action does tangle with the First Amendment, it shows that big companies also care about society and its problems. In my opinion, PETA has some sort of right to ban books helping animal abuse since it directly conflicts with its views and morals.
In some ways I can agree with Nichole that books are essentially knowledge, and we should embrace this, whether its healthy knowledge or just an opportunity for us to find out things that we normally wouldn't know about...i.e. animal abuse and child abuse. If we didn't have books informing us about these subjects, then how do organizations such as PETA expect us to want to join them and help fight against such abuse? Even though banning these books serves to protect the public and help stop abuse, in actuality they may have their benefits in helping us realize that we should do something to help.
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