Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Homeless Children and Banned Books

What do homeless children and banned books have in common? Homeless children are promoted by the National Center on Family Homelessness, "[a] group whose raison d'être is homelessness [and who] has an obvious interest in exaggerating the extent of the problem." See "Double Trouble? The Majority of 'Homeless' Children Live in Homes," by James Taranto, Wall Street Journal—Best of the Web, 10 March 2009.

Similarly, "banned books" are promoted by the American Library Association [ALA] whose "Office for Intellectual Freedom's" [OIF] raison d'être is ensuring children maintain access to inappropriate materials that may be kept from them legally. The OIF has "an obvious interest in exaggerating the extent of the problem." For example, one time the ALA claimed racism when parents attempted to "ban" a book that included bestiality from a public school. Why racism? Because, according to the ALA, the author was black and the parents were using bestiality as an excuse to remove a book by a black author.

It's worse. Sadly, there are actually homeless children in the USA, though vastly fewer than the media reports. Regarding "banned books," that stopped occurring in the USA many decades ago. In other words, books are no longer banned, and there's no further need for National Hogwash Week (a.k.a. Banned Books Week or BBW).

So what homeless children and "banned books" have in common is that they are both used for propaganda purposes by motivated organizations that use fancy language, twisted definitions, and statistics to hide the truth from the public.

Anyway, that's my observation upon reading the James Taranto article. Does anyone else see what I see?

.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments of a personal nature, trolling, and linkspam may be removed.