Town officials in Enfield, Connecticut, have been accused in the court of public opinion of censoring the public library by forcing the library director to postpone indefinitely the January 21 screening of the Michael Moore film Sicko. Ironically, the controversy over the exposé of the American healthcare industry began two days before the U.S. House voted to repeal healthcare reform.
The story began with an e-mail from area resident and Enfield Republican Town Committee (RTC) member Kevin Fealy to Enfield Mayor Scott R. Kaupin inquiring into the library’s programming choice. Mayor Kaupin said in the January 21 Manchester Journal Inquirer that he e-mailed questions about the film choice to library Director Henry Dutcher and Town Manager Matthew Coppler, who is Dutcher’s immediate supervisor. Several days later, Fealy and fellow residents Dominic Alaimo and Joseph Albert expressed their concerns at an Enfield City Council meeting January 18. “If we do want to see differing points of view,” Fealy told council members, “I would suggest films like The Passion of the Christ.” (A video of the 145-minute meeting is here.)
Alaimo and Albert are also members of the RTC, although Kaupin said that the men's objections were not orchestrated by the committee. He confirmed to the Journal Inquirer that they prompted his ordering Coppler to ask library Director Henry Dutcher to “reconsider” the already-scheduled screening. Kaupin remarked during the council meeting that he considered Sicko “a poor choice” and that Dutcher would “have to answer for it” at budget time if he didn’t reconsider.
A day later, the Connecticut Library Association issued a statement deploring the cancellation and asserting, “If politicians in Connecticut cities and towns felt free to remove or cancel showings of materials that they didn’t like or were controversial, the basic freedom of speech rights of town residents would be denied.” CLA President Debbie Herman told the Journal Inquirer January 22 that the association is looking into finding a library in a neighboring town that will screen Sicko.
In his first interview since the town manager lifted a gag order on his speaking to the press, Dutcher said in the January 25 newspaper of the sequence of events, “What we’ve been through has been very positive in the outcome,” adding rhetorically, “What would I have gained simply by showing a movie on one particular date?” He confirmed that the library still planned to screen Sicko, but in a balanced forum in which other viewpoints would also be presented. Coppler has acknowledged ordering the cancellation of Enfield Public Library’s documentary series on controversial topics until Dutcher creates a plan “that lived up to that.”
Asserting that the controversy in Enfield “reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the public library,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom explained that balance in a library collection or program “certainly does not mean that all opinions must be presented all at once” but is instead “an assurance that the interested library user will be able to find a diversity of opinion within the library’s collection over time.”
