Sunday, September 21, 2014

Banned Books Week Excerpt: Anal Sex Book for 12 Year Old Girl in Rancho Cucamonga Middle School

In the latest demonstration of just what a hoax is Banned Books Week, a public school rightly removed a book containing inappropriate material including graphic anal sex from its middle school library and is now scouring for more such books.  No doubt they will be labeled as "censors":
RANCHO CUCAMONGA (CBSLA.com) — Parents were shocked when they discovered a novel with erotic dialogue was being checked out and read by their children in their middle school’s library. 
The popular novel from the 1980s, “Rabbit is Rich” by famed author John Updike, has a number of graphic sexual scenes many parents say are unacceptable for younger readers to have access to. 
“I wouldn’t even want my kids to read it in high school,” Rancho Cucamonga resident Monica Reyes said. 
Another mother says that her 12-year-old daughter came home from Rancho Cucamonga Middle School one day with the adult novel, which she had checked out from the school’s library. 
The mother took to social media to voice her concern, sharing an erotic excerpt from the book, stating, “My 12 year old daughter brought home this book ‘Rabbit is Rich’ from Rancho Cucamonga Middle School library last week. She started reading it Monday and came to me concerned with the contents that were in the book. As I read it for myself, I became appalled by what I was reading as you can see for yourself. 
“As a concerned parent as to why this book would be in a kids school in the first place, I went directly to the principal’s office the very next day and the district.”


That is the response most people would expect since most people oppose sexually explicit materials in public schools.  Banned Books Week, created by a member of the Board of Directors of the Illinois ACLU who then joined the American Library Association and created the hoax, claims removal of such books is "censorship," 100% of the people who do this are "censors," censors usually act alone or with the support of people such as myself, and no one supports the "censors."

Predictably, Joan Bertin, Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, complains about the removal of "literary classics ... like ... John Updike" books from public schools and calls it "censorship."  She decries the "never-ending assault on books in school that contain anything that someone finds controversial, provocative, unpleasant, or offensive":

Could literary classics by Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning authors like William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner and John Updike be next on the chopping block? You bet, if we accept the idea that children should be protected from learning about life or fed only sanitized glimpses.

That's right, schools must not protect twelve year old girls from learning the exact details of one way to allow someone to sodomize them and urinate on them and ejaculate on their faces, which is what the Rancho Cucamonga Middle School girl read in the John Updike book, excerpt below.  After all, someone will eventually do this to them, so they might as well learn how to react while "at a safe distance" in public school, which is an actual ALA argument for allowing this.  This from the NCAC, a cosponsor of Banned Books Week.  Why not call it Misogyny and Pedophilia Week?

Part of the hoax of Banned Books Week is to not reveal what inappropriate material is actually being removed.  Even where the claim is made right in the title to reveal such material, it is not done.  It is not done because if people knew the truth, they would agree such material is not for public schools and would have it removed:
Another part of the hoax is to proclaim all the awards a book wins.  Indeed, the John Updike school book won the 1982 National Book Award.  Why are censors trying to keep kids from award winning books?  Who are they to tell others what children can and cannot read?


School Librarians Are Trained To Mislead

Here is an example of directions school librarians are given to mislead people about such materials.  Notice the directions, shown in the graphics below, are written to turn aside questions about the inappropriateness of school material and use them as another opportunity for propaganda, like how libraries may not limit access based on "age" when the US Supreme Court says the exact opposite: "There are substantial Government interests at stake here: The interest in protecting young library users from material inappropriate for minors is legitimate, and even compelling, as all Members of the Court appear to agree."

Notice the cover of "Banned Books" by Robert P. Doyle shows harmless books, not those like the John Updike one in the Rancho Cucamonga Middle School.  Notice the diktat not to engage in discussion on an issue such as pornography in the public school, instead, "Beware of manipulation.  Some reporters may ask leading questions, something like, 'Isn't it true that...?'  Make your own statement":







Media Fears Publishing Excerpts So People Remain Uninformed; I'll Inform Them

I'm going to reveal the truth about this John Updike school book, despite its winning awards, despite the excerpt below being pure porn, a word the American Library Association trains librarians not to use.  It is so outrageously pure porn in this school book that media will not even speak of it.  ALA benefits when media cannot even speak of the matter.  That way people do not really know the depth of the problem.  The school children can read it but the adults cannot discuss it.

So let's all grit our teeth and grind through an actual excerpt from a school book a twelve year old girl was reading until her mom reported the book to the school and the school removed it.  Think of the effect reading such material has on the mind of a young girl.  See if you think keeping a preteen school kid from reading this is "censorship."  There's a lot excerpted because ALA always claims context is important, so I'm providing context, not a single paragraph or two.

I know I'll get criticism and ridicule for reprinting this, but you just don't see this in the main stream media and someone has to do it to explain what is going on in public schools.  This is the kind of material in school books that ALA, NCAC, and many more claim is censorship to remove—you have to read this to believe it—this was in a public school—children actually read this—and Banned Books Week is the hoax needed to drive the ALA/ACLU's agenda ensuring school children retain access to such material:


Except of School Book from Rancho Cucamonga Middle School

Thelma with what breaks upon him like the clatter of an earthquake has come out of the bathroom. She is holding her underclothes in front of her, and with her back to him she sorts the underpants into the dirty pile the Harrisons keep beside the bureau, behind the straw wastebasket, and the bra, clean enough, back into the drawer, folded. This is the second time in this trip, he thinks drowsily, that he has seen her ass. Her body as she turns eclipses the bureau lamp and the front of her gathers shadow to itself, she advances timidly, as if wading into water. Her breasts sway forward as she bends to turn the light he switched off back on. She sits down on the edge of the bed.

His prick is still sleepy. She takes it into her hand. "You're not circumcised."

"No, they somehow weren't doing it at the hospital that day. Or maybe my mother had a theory, I don't know. I never asked. Sorry."

"It's lovely. Like a little bonnet." Sitting on the edge of the bed, more supple naked than he remembers her seeming with clothes on, Thelma bends and takes his prick in her mouth. Her body in the lamplight is a pale patchwork of faint tan and peeling pink and the natural yellowy tint of her skin. Her belly puckers into flat folds like stacked newspapers and the back of her hand as it holds the base of his prick with two fingers shows a dim lightning of blue veins. But her breath is warm and wet and the way that in lamplight individual white hairs snake as if singed through the mass of dull brown makes him want to reach out and stroke her head, or touch the rhythmic hollow in her jaw. He fears, though, interrupting the sensations she is giving him. She lifts a hand quickly to tuck back a piece of her hair, as if to let him better see.

He murmurs, "Beautiful." He is growing thick and long but still she forces her lips each time down to her fingers as they encircle him at his base. To give herself ease she spreads her legs; between her legs, one of them lying aslant across the bed edge, he sees emerging from a pubic bush more delicate and reddish than he would have dreamed a short white string. Unlike Janice's or Cindy's as he imagined it, Thelma's pussy is not opaque; it is a fuzz transparent upon the bruise-colored labia that with their tongue of white string look so lacking and defenseless Harry could cry. She too is near tears, perhaps from the effort of not gagging. She backs off and stares at the staring eye of his glans, swollen free of his foreskin. She pulls up the bonnet again and says crooningly, teasingly, "Such a serious little face." She kisses it lightly, once, twice, flicking her tongue, then bobs again, until it seems she must come up for air. "God," she sighs. "I've wanted to do that for so long. Come. Come, Harry. Come in my mouth. Come in my mouth and all over my face." Her voice sounds husky and mad saying this and all through her words Thelma does not stop gazing at the little slit of his where a single cloudy tear has now appeared. She licks it off.

"Have you really," he asks timidly, "liked me for a while?"

"Years," she says. "Years. And you never noticed. You shit. Always under Janice's thumb and mooning after silly Cindy. Well you know where Cindy is now. She's being screwed by my husband. He didn't want to, he said he'd rather go to bed with me." She snorts, in some grief of self-disgust, and plunges her mouth down again, and in the pinchy rush of sensation as he feels forced against the opening of her throat he wonders if he should accept her invitation.

"Wait," Harry says. "Shouldn't I do something for you first? If I come, it's all over."

"If you come, then you come again."

"Not at my age. I don't think."

"Your age. Always talking about your age." Thelma rests her face on his belly and gazes up at him, for the first time playful, her eyes at right angles to his disconcertingly. He has never noticed their color before: that indeterminate color called hazel but in the strong light overhead, and brightened by all her deep-throating, given a tawny pallor, an unthinking animal translucence. "I'm too excited to come," she tells him. "Anyway, Harry, I'm having my period and they're really bloody, every other month. I'm scared to find out why. In the months in between, these terrible cramps and hardly any show."

"See a doctor," he suggests.

"I see doctors all the time, they're useless. I'm dying, you know that, don't you?"

"Dying?"

"Well, maybe that's too dramatic a way of putting it. Nobody knows how long it'll take, and a lot of it depends upon me. The one thing I'm absolutely supposed not to do is go out in the sun. I was crazy to come down here, Ronnie tried to talk me out of it."

"Why did you?"

"Guess. I tell you, I'm crazy, Harry. I got to get you out of my system." And it seems she might make that sob of disgusted grief again, but she has reared up her head to look at his prick. All this talk of death has put it half to sleep again.

"This is this lupus?" he asks.

"Mmm," Thelma says. "Look. See the rash?" She pulls back her hair on both sides. "Isn't it pretty? That's from being so stupid in the sun Friday. I just wanted so badly to be like the rest of you, not to be an invalid. It was terrible Saturday. Your joints ache, your insides don't work. Ronnie offered to take me home for a shot of cortisone."

"He's very nice to you."

"He loves me."

His prick has stiffened again and she bends to it. "Thelma." He has not used her name before, this night. "Let me do something to you. I mean, equal rights and all that."

"You're not going down into all that blood."

"Let me suck these sweet things then." Her nipples are not bumply like Janice's but perfect as a baby's thumb-tips. Since it is his treat now he feels free to reach up and switch off the light over the bed. In the dark her rashes disappear and he can see her smile as she arranges herself to be served. She sits cross-legged, like Cindy did on the boat, women the flexible sex, and puts a pillow in her lap for his head. She puts a finger in his mouth and plays with her nipple and his tongue together. There is a tremble running through her like a radio not quite turned off. His hand finds her ass, its warm dents; there is a kind of glassy texture to Thelma's skin where Janice's has a touch of fine, fine sandpaper. His prick, lightly teased by her fingernails, has come back nicely. "Harry." Her voice presses into his ear. "I want to do something for you so you won't forget me, something you've never had with anybody else. I suppose other women have sucked you off?"

He shakes his head yes, which tugs the flesh of her breast.

"How many have you fucked up the ass?"

He lets her nipple slip from his mouth. "None. Never."

"You and Janice?"

"Oh God no. It never occurred to us."

"Harry. You're not fooling me?"

How dear that was, her old-fashioned "fooling." From talking to all those third-graders. "No, honestly. I thought only queers… Do you and Ronnie?"

"All the time. Well, a lot of the time. He loves it."

"And you?"

"It has its charms."

"Doesn't it hurt? I mean, he's big."

"At first. You use Vaseline. I'll get ours."

"Thelma, wait. Am I up to this?"

She laughs a syllable. "You're up." She slides away into the bathroom and while she is gone he stays enormous. She returns and anoints him thoroughly, with an icy expert touch. Harry shudders. Thelma lies down beside him with her back turned, curls forward as if to be shot from a cannon, and reaches behind to guide him. "Gently."

It seems it won't go, but suddenly it does. The medicinal odor of displaced Vaseline reaches his nostrils. The grip is tight at the base but beyond, where a cunt is all velvety suction and caress, there is no sensation: a void, a pure black box, a casket of perfect nothingness. He is in that void, past her tight ring of muscle. He asks, "May I come?"

"Please do." Her voice sounds faint and broken. Her spine and shoulder blades are taut.

It takes only a few thrusts, while he rubs her scalp with one hand and clamps her hip steady with the other. Where will his come go? Nowhere but mix with her shit. With sweet Thelma's sweet shit. They lie wordless and still together until his prick's slow shrivelling withdraws it. "O.K.," he says. "Thank you. That I won't forget."

"Promise?"

"I feel embarrassed. What does it do for you?"

"Makes me feel full of you. Makes me feel fucked up the ass. By lovely Harry Angstrom."

"Thelma," he admits, "I can't believe you're so fond of me. What have I done to deserve it?"

"Just existed. Just shed your light. Haven't you ever noticed, at parties or at the club, how I'm always at your side?"

"Well, not really. There aren't that many sides. I mean, we see you and Ronnie -"

"Janice and Cindy noticed. They knew you were who I'd want."

"Uh - not to, you know, milk this, but what is it about me that turns you on?"

"Oh darling. Everything. Your height and the way you move, as if you're still a skinny twenty-five. The way you never sit down anywhere without making sure there's a way out. Your little provisional smile, like a little boy at some party where the bullies might get him the next minute. Your good humor. You believe in people so - Webb, you hang on his words where nobody else pays 'any attention, and Janice, you're so proud of her it's pathetic. It's not as if she can do anything. Even her tennis, Doris Kaufmann was telling us, really -'

"Well it's nice to see her have fun at something, she's had a kind of dreary life."

"See? You're just terribly generous. You're so grateful to be anywhere, you think that tacky club and that hideous house of Cindy's are heaven. It's wonderful. You're so glad to be alive."

"Well, I mean, considering the alternative

"It kills me. I love you so much for it. And your hands. I've always loved your hands." Having sat up on the edge of the bed, she takes his left hand, lying idle, and kisses the big white moons of each fingernail. "And now your prick, with its little bonnet. Oh Harry I don't care if this kills me, coming down here, tonight is worth it."

That void, inside her. He can't take his mind from what he's discovered, that nothingness seen by his single eye. In the shadows, while humid blue moonlight and the rustle of palms seep through the louvers by the bed, he trusts himself to her as if speaking in prayer, talks to her about himself as he has talked to none other: about Nelson and the grudge he bears the kid and the grudge the boy bears him, and about his daughter, the daughter he thinks he has, grown and ignorant of him. He dares confide to Thelma, because she has let him fuck her up the ass in proof of love, his sense of miracle at being himself, himself instead of somebody else, and his old inkling, now fading in the energy crunch, that there was something that wanted him to find it, that he was here on earth on a kind of assignment.

"How lovely to think that," Thelma says. "It makes you" - the word is hard for her to find - "radiant. And sad." She gives him advice on some points. She thinks he should seek out Ruth and ask her point-blank if that is his daughter, and if so is there anything he can do to help? On the subject of Nelson, she thinks the child's problem may be an extension of Harry's; if he himself did not feel guilty about Jill's death and before that Rebecca's, he would feel less threatened by Nelson and more comfortable and kindly with him. "Remember," she says, "he's just a young man like you once were, looking for his path."

"But he's not like me!" Harry protests, having come at last into a presence where the full horror of this truth, the great falling-off, will be understood. "He's a goddam little Springer, through and through."

Thelma thinks he's more like Harry than he knows. Wanting to learn to hang glide - didn't he recognize himself in that? And the thing with two girls at once. Wasn't he, possibly, a bit jealous of Nelson?

"But I never had the impulse to screw Melanie," he confesses. "Or Pru either, much. They're both out of this world, somehow."

Of course, Thelma says. "You shouldn't want to fuck them. They're your daughters. Or Cindy either. You should want to fuck me. I'm your generation, Harry. I can see you. To those girls you're just an empty heap of years and money."

And, as they drift in talk away from the constellations of his life, she describes her marriage with Ronnie, his insecurities and worries beneath that braggart manner that she knows annoys Harry. "He was never a star like you, he never had that for a moment." She met him fairly well along in her twenties, when she was wondering if she'd die a spinster schoolteacher. Being old as she was, with some experience of men, and with a certain gift for letting go, she was amused by the things he thought of. For their honeymoon breakfast he jerked off into the scrambled eggs and they ate his fried jism with the rest. If you go along with everything on that side of Ronnie, he's wonderfully loyal, and docile, you could say. He has no interest in other women, she knows this for a fact, a curious fact even, given the nature of men. He's been a perfect father. When he was lower down on the totem pole at Schuylkill Mutual, he lost twenty pounds, staying awake nights worrying. Only in these last few years has the weight come back. When the first diagnosis of her lupus came through, he took it worse than she did, in a way. "For a woman past forty, Harry, when you've had children … If some Nazi or somebody came to me and they'd take either me or little Georgie, say - he's the one that's needed most help, so he comes to mind - it wouldn't be a hard choice. For Ronnie I think it might be. To lose me. He thinks what I do for him not every woman would. I suspect he's wrong but there it is." And she admits she likes his cock. But what Harry might not appreciate, being a man, is that a big one like Ronnie's doesn't change size that much when it's hard, just the angle changes. It doesn't go from being a little bonneted sleeping baby to a tall fierce soldier like this. She has worked him up again, idly toying as she talks, while the night outside their louvered window has grown utterly still, the last drunken shout and snatch of music long died, nothing astir but the incessant sighing of the sea and the piping of some high-pitched cricket they have down here. Courteously he offers to fuck her through her blood, and she refuses with an almost virginal fright, so that he wonders if on the excuse of her flow she is not holding this part of herself back from him, aloof from her love and shamelessness, pure for her marriage. She has explained, "When I realized I was falling in love with you, I was so mad at myself, I mean it couldn't contribute to anything. But then I came to see that something must be missing between me and Ronnie, or maybe in any life, so I tried to accept it, and even quietly enjoy it, just watching you. My little hairshirt." He has not kissed her yet on the mouth, but now having guessed at her guilty withholding of herself from being simply fucked he does. Guilt he can relate to. Her lips feel cool and dry, considering. Since she will not admit him to her cunt, as compromise he masturbates her while sitting on her face, glad he thought of washing where he did. Her tongue probes there and her fingers, as cool on top of his as if still filmed with Vaseline, guide his own as they find and then lose and find again the hooded little center that is her. She comes with a smothered cry and arches her back so this darkness at the center of her pale and smooth and unfamiliar form rises hungrily under his eyes, a cloud with a mouth, a fish lunging upwards out of water. Getting her breath, she returns the kindness and with him watches the white liquid lift and collapse in glutinous strings across her hand. She rubs his jism on her face, where it shines like sun lotion. The stillness outside is beginning to brighten, each leaf sharp in the soft air. Drunk on fatigue and selfexposure, he begs her to tell him something that he can do to her that Ronnie has never done. She gets into the bathtub and has him urinate on her. "It's hot!" she exclaims, her sallow skin drummed upon in designs such as men and boys drill in the snow. They reverse the experience, Thelma awkwardly straddling, and having to laugh at her own impotence, looking for the right release in the maze of her womanly insides. Above him as he waits her bush has a masculine jut, but when her stream comes, it dribbles sideways; women cannot aim, he sees. And her claim of heat seems to him exaggerated; it is more like coffee or tea one lets cool too long at the edge of the desk and then must drink in a few gulps, this side of tepid. Having tried together to shower the ammoniac scent of urine off their skins, Thelma and Harry fall asleep among the stripes of dawn now welling through the louvers, they sleep as if not a few more stolen hours but an entire married life of sanctioned intimacy stretches unto death before them.

URL of this page:  safelibraries.blogspot.com/2014/09/bbw.html

On Twitter: @BannedBooksWeek @NCACensorship @OIF @VaselineBrand



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Location: Chicago, IL, USA

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Ballot Question: Do Citizens Want Child Porn Filters in a Public Library; Pro Child Porn Trustees Bully Those Seeking to Take the Pulse of the Public

Some library trustees on the Orland Park Public Library [OPPL] Board of Trustees want to ask the public if they approve child porn filters in the library.  After all, Federal Communication Commission [FCC] expert Lisa Hone just told the American Library Association [ALA] that having library filters is a community decision, not just a decision for the few people in charge who are opposed philosophically.

How philosophically opposed?  Watch pro-child porn trustees, including the homophobic Diane Jennings, Esq., shout down other trustees and otherwise be rude to them.  Jennings: "It just, we're not going to keep beating this dead horse.  ... I mean we have to jump up like, like puppets." Dan Drew:  "It has nothing to do with that.  It's, it's what Cathy feels.  If you feel that way it's, it's nothing to get mad about you."  Diane Jennings: "Cathy should have been at the last meeting."

Watch Denis Ryan be dismissive of the public.  Cathy Lebert: "Wouldn't you want to know what the people want, Denis?"  Ryan: "No I don't."  And this is the guy whose pro-child porn policy is now driving the entire community, along with a few others, like the anti-gay Jennings.

Keep in mind when the claim is made that library filters are not connected to the issue of raising taxes, the taxes are being raised precisely because the library refused to comply with the law regarding public questions about filtering and spent almost $200,000 on silencing critics, especially me, and cementing the pro-child porn policy:


Transcript [as best I could hear, what with crosstalk and not enough volume; improvements welcome]:
Cathy Lebert: Can we also have a questionnaire, "would you like filters on adult computers." 
Diane Jennings: We've already voted on that, Cathy. 
Denis Ryan:  We voted, we've already voted for it. 
Cathy Lebert:  Same thing, same thing, both questions, we voted...
Diane Jennings: Cathy, we voted. 
Cathy Lebert: He voted, I'm just saying, ask the public what they want, just like we ask the public this way.  We have never asked.  We've had people come and talk.... 
Voice from the left: That's, that's not my decision, that's not my decision. 
Cathy Lebert: Well, I say we have a vote on that.  It think that's a good, we're doing it anyway, asking a question. 
Denis Ryan: We already voted on it, Cathy. 
Dan Drew: Well wouldn't you want to know, Denis? 
Cathy Lebert: Would you want to know what the people want, Denis? 
Denis Ryan: No I don't.  Everyone I've heard said no.  They don't want filters on adult computers.  I talked to people, I talked to.  People called me up they said some nice flyer that somebody dropped off at my house and I talked to them.  When I explained the situation to them and how it all came about, they said no. 
Diane Jennings: There were people that called me and I had a chance to talk  with them and... 
Cathy Lebert: What are you afraid of? 
Denis Ryan: We're not afraid of anything! 
Cathy Lebert: Then ask the question. 
Diane Jennings: Yeah, where you gonna go [unclear if this is accurate] 
Cathy Lebert: Denis, why not ask the question? Do you think people are ill informed to know?
Denis Ryan: Because the one doesn't have anything to do with the other. 
Cathy Lebert: It's a question that we're asking the public their opinion. 
Denis Ryan: No.  We're asking about the levy increase. 
Cathy Lebert: Right, it's their opinion on it.  That's where there's an opinion on the other thing. [unclear]
Denis Ryan: Well. 
Cathy Lebert: I'm just saying.  What are you afraid of? 
Denis Ryan: I'm not afraid of anything. 
Diane Jennings:  It just, we're not going to keep beating this dead horse.  Just because they're going to come every time doesn't mean we have to jump up like, like puppets. 
Dan Drew:  It has nothing to do with that.  It's, it's what Cathy feels.  If you feel that way it's, it's nothing to get mad about.  [unclear]
Diane Jennings: Cathy should have been at the last meeting.
....
Cathy Lebert: If you going through what we're going though right now... 
Nancy Wendt Healy: [hand placed on Cathy Lebert's arm] ... Cathy, that's a little bit of fatigue with, with um, ah, [unintelligible] for right now, I don't know.
Essentially, the library trustees seeking to take the pulse of the people were shot down again, again with bullying.  Anything it takes to keep the child porn flowing.

And yes, Cathy and Dan, they are afraid.  A few people are forcing their will on the community, and they know once people are fully informed, such as by the FCC expert I linked above, they will choose to act to follow the law and make libraries for the benefit of the people, not for distribution of harmful material.  ALA is already the nation's leader in facilitating porn in libraries, and ALA is using OPPL as its Theresienstadt model camp: attack the whistleblowers no matter the cost, draw attention away from the law that makes illegal what OPPL is doing.

Notice above Denis Ryan said everyone he spoke with opposes filters.  Since he keeps shuffling papers for the past year's worth of meetings, that's no surprise as he likely did not hear or does not recall the steady stream of opposition to the repeated sex crimes occurring in his library.

Notice Diane Jennings told Cathy Lebert she was beating a dead horse.  She wants Cathy Lebert to act like the monkey who can speak no evil, image top right.

And Nancy Wendt Healy touches Cathy to silence her as well with a comment about how fatigued she is.  How do the child porn victims feel?  Fatigued?  Yet the library closely coordinates with ALA and repeatedly silences me despite the law and despite Illinois Attorney General determinations.

I am featured in this video for having been silenced by the library
while the American Library Association speaks freely and incorrectly.

At the same meeting shown above, below are two speakers specifically stating that the library refused to hear from me—how can you say you're beating a dead horse when you would not even listen to an expert opposing ALA's flat out lies?  They have not even discussed things like the issue of Fortinet's FortiGuard® Web Filtering Service—that got completely overlooked:


I have more in the pipeline about this library, and it's not going to be pretty.


NOTE ADDED 19 September 2014:

Updated to add more to the transcript that I did not previously understand.


URL of this page:  safelibraries.blogspot.com/2014/09/ballot-question.html

On Twitter:  @Fortinet @IntolerantFox @OIF @OrlandPkLibrary @VillageOrlandOK

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Location: Orland Park Public Library, 14921 South Ravinia Avenue, Orland Park, IL 60462, USA

Monday, September 8, 2014

Banned Books Week Nonsense Censorship Talk is Ridiculous, Says Library Journal

Banned Books Week is a hoax and fake censorship talk is ridiculous, all the while libraries justify censoring out works they don't like, like about ex-gays.  That's basically what the Annoyed Librarian at the Library Journal said when she discussed censorship versus selection.  I couldn't have said it better myself, so I'm reposting it in full:

Another Problem with Banned Books Talk

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014 BY ; LIBRARY JOURNAL 
One of the many problems with the ALA approach to so-called banned books is that it opens the door to easy criticisms by raging homophobes like this person.
The general gist of the criticism is that while librarians talk a good game about intellectual freedom and are against “censorship” and “banning books,” in fact their entire collection development process effectively bans books that librarians disagree with politically.
Libraries use Collection Development Policies (CDP’s) to determine which books they will purchase with their limited budgets. CDP’s hold that librarians should purchase only books that have been positively reviewed by two “professionally recognized” review journals. Guess what folks, the “professionally recognized” review journals are dominated by ideological “progressives.”
That’s pretty hard to argue with, because she’s right and we all know it. It doesn’t even mention that a lot of times it’s other librarians reviewing the books anyway, thus guaranteeing that the choices will be kept within the profession and that books librarians don’t like won’t be reviewed and thus won’t be purchased.
Considering the way the ALA defines intellectual freedom and censorship, it’s hard not to agree with the homophobic crusader here. Librarians do effectively keep certain kinds of books out of the view of readers. They do it because of their beliefs about what books are good or bad, and those beliefs are occasionally political in nature.
If library patrons ask for a book to be moved or removed from the children’s section, it’s “censorship.” If librarians make sure a book never gets there in the first place through a deliberately rigged collection process, it’s “selection.” Double standards prevail, making librarians look like hypocrites.
It’s a pity that a profession that so upholds intellectual freedom can’t come up with better strategies and arguments than to whine about “censorship” while effectively doing the very thing they complain about.
It must be possible. One could argue that certain types of books are motivated by a kind of hatred that’s inappropriate for children to see.
Will they ask for picture books that show the joy a little birdie experiences when after the West Nile virus deaths of her two daddies, she’s finally adopted by a daddy and mommy?”
Anyone who writes a book where children are happy their parents died of a terrible disease because they hate gay people so much is a pretty horrible person, after all, and keeping the product of their sick minds away from the kiddies is probably a good idea.
But not all homophobic books are necessarily hateful. Fearful, probably, but that never stops libraries from buying books. If there’s a book warning about the dangers of rapid climate change, then there’s a fearful book in the library.
One could argue that some categories of books are just dumb, or that they’re so devoid of scientific evidence that they’re useless books. Praying away the gay is about as useful as praying away the stupid. It just doesn’t work.
But that’s never stopped libraries either. Plenty of libraries have books about UFO abductions in the nonfiction section, and yet the scientific evidence for them is almost nil. Libraries also buy books advocating homeopathy, crystal healing, and other new age nonsense. Same deal.
One could argue that the books are religiously motivated, which is somehow inappropriate for public libraries. Separation of church and state and all that.
But libraries purchase Bibles and Korans and other religious texts. Some public libraries probably purchase religious fiction like the Left Behind books. There’s no good reason they shouldn’t. Religious readers are library users, too. So that argument is out.
One could argue that libraries are about more than intellectual freedom, that they have some other sorts of political values as well. Equality, diversity, tolerance, etc.
The homophobic crusader might reply that not buying homophobic books signals a lack of diversity. After all, the homophobic position is one of the voices out there, if not a majority voice anymore certainly a popular one, and a truly diverse collection would include it in the “marketplace of ideas.”
That one’s hard to refute. Equality and tolerance might work better. Books that claim certain categories of people shouldn’t be allowed to marry or raise children can claim to be among the diversity of voices, but they can’t claim to support equality, tolerance, or even democracy in a lot of America these days.
There are librarians who talk about libraries as places to promote equality and tolerance, but that’s not the “official” line.
The ALA Library Bill of Rights talks about providing books for the “interest, information, and enlightenment of all people,” which sounds promising along those lines, but then immediately says libraries “should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues.”
That sounds like library collections are completely neutral collections, but obviously they’re not. Go to your local library and find some aggressively pro-racism books there. What? There aren’t any? Does that mean that there are no local racists around?
The homophobic crusader was discussing the Schaumburg Township District Library, which apparently had pictures of librarians holding up “banned books,” “you know, books that are widely available in virtually every community library.”
She then lists some antigay books that the librarians could also take pictures of themselves holding. Since none of those books are considered “banned” by the ALA, that’s a pointless suggestion, but her point is valid. “Unlike the books the librarians are holding this year, these books actually aren’t in their library. Hmmm, I wonder if they were banned.”
If there are no books in your library’s collection talking about how awful gay marriage is, then your library isn’t providing materials presenting all points of view.
Librarians tend to be true believers about the banned book nonsense, and it’s pretty hard to reason with them but I’m not giving up just yet. The censorship talk is ridiculous, and librarians would be better off promoting what they do in a smarter way.
Librarians should just own up to the fact that they have a broad political agenda, and one that promotes equality while fighting intolerance.
They don’t defend gay penguin books because they really believe all points of view should be represented in libraries. The defend gay penguin books because they believe that gay penguins should be treated equally to straight penguins, and their constituencies have both gay and straight penguins. Or something like that.
They don’t seek out homophobic children’s books because they’re opposed to diverse viewpoints in the library collection. They don’t seek them out because they don’t seek out children’s books that promote intolerance, hate, or inequality.
It’s the same reason they wouldn’t buy racist children’s books, and they probably wouldn’t buy racist children’s books even if a library patron requested the purchase. There are just certain viewpoints that people devoted to freedom, equality, diversity, and tolerance don’t consider worth buying.
So go on talking about censorship and banned books, librarians. I know what you’re really about. You’re really trying to promote intellectual freedom, equality, and tolerance for all types of library patrons. You’re just afraid to say it in your collection development policies.

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Related post:

Through its de facto censorship mechanism, cunningly obscured behind the sterile nomenclature "Collection Development Policy," the American Library Association has become a corrupt, hypocritical organization committed to promulgating biased, subversive social and political views on the controversial topic of homosexuality. On this topic one thing's certain: if you're looking for intellectual diversity, stay out of your libraries.


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