Banning books in schools (1 Viewer)

Users who are viewing this thread

    Optimus Prime

    Well-known member
    Joined
    Sep 28, 2019
    Messages
    11,909
    Reaction score
    15,691
    Age
    48
    Location
    Washington DC Metro
    Online
    Excellent article I thought deserved its own thread
    =========================

    On the surface, it would appear that book censors and censored authors like myself can agree on one thing: Books are powerful.

    Particularly books for children and teens.

    Why else would people like me spend so much time and energy writing them?

    Why else would censors spend so much time and energy trying to keep them out of kids’ hands?

    In a country where the average adult is reading fewer and fewer books, it’s a surprise to find Americans arguing so much about them.

    In this election year, parents and politicians — so many politicians — are jumping into the fray to say how powerful books can be.

    Granted, politicians often make what I do sound like witchcraft, but I take this as a compliment.

    I’ll admit, one of my first thoughts about the current wildfire of attempted censorship was: How quaint.

    Conservatives seemed to be dusting off their playbook from 1958, when the only way our stories could get to kids was through schools and libraries.

    While both are still crucial sanctuaries for readers, they’re hardly the only options. Plenty of booksellers supply titles that are taken off school shelves.

    And words can be very widely shared free of charge on social media and the rest of the internet. If you take my book off a shelf, you keep it away from that shelf, but you hardly keep it away from readers.

    As censorship wars have raged in so many communities, damaging the lives of countless teachers, librarians, parents and children, it’s begun to feel less and less quaint.

    This is not your father’s book censorship…..

    Here’s something I never thought I’d be nostalgic for: sincere censors. When my first novel, “Boy Meets Boy,” was published in 2003, it was immediately the subject of many challenges, some of which kept the book from ever getting on a shelf in the first place.

    At the time, a challenge usually meant one parent trying to get a book pulled from a school or a library, going through a formal process.

    I often reminded myself to try to find some sympathy for these parents; yes, they were wrong, and their desire to control what other people in the community got to read was wrong — but more often than not, the challenge was coming from fear of a changing world, a genuine (if incorrect) belief that being gay would lead kids straight to ruination and hell, and/or the misbegotten notion that if all the books that challenged the (homophobic, racist) status quo went away, then the status quo would remain intact.

    It was, in some ways, as personal to them as it was to those of us on the other side of the challenge.

    And nine times out of 10, the book would remain on the shelf.

    It’s not like that now. What I’ve come to believe, as I’ve talked to authors and librarians and teachers, is that attacks are less and less about the actual books.

    We’re being used as targets in a much larger proxy war.

    The goal of that war isn’t just to curtail intellectual freedom but to eviscerate the public education system in this country.

    Censors are scorching the earth, without care for how many kids get burned.

    Racism and homophobia are still very much present, but it’s also a power grab, a money grab. The goal for many is a for-profit, more authoritarian and much less diverse culture, one in which truth is whatever you’re told it is, your identity is determined by its acceptability and the past is a lie that the future is forced to emulate.

    The politicians who holler and post and draw up their lists of “harmful” books aren’t actually scared of our books.

    They are using our books to scare people.

     
    Last edited:
    A North Texas law enforcement officer spent two years unsuccessfully trying to charge school librarians for distributing books he objected to, according to a NBC News and NBC 5 investigation.

    The report is the latest addition to the nation’s fight over the freedom to read, which has led to book removals, lawsuits and even death threats in the Lone Star State. In the North Texas town of Granbury, it also resulted in one man’s investigation into and pursuit of felony charges against librarians for doing their jobs.

    Scott London, a Hood County chief deputy constable, didn’t just accuse three Granbury Independent School District librarians of allowing children to access books he thought were obscene. He visited schools, spoke to district staff, issued subpoenas, obtained student records and drafted criminal complaints.

    London sought felony charges for distributing harmful material to a minor, which carry a penalty of two to 10 years in prison and fines up to $10,000.

    In June 2024, Hood County District Attorney Ryan Sinclair declined London’s request to indict the librarians, citing a lack of evidence.

    “Granbury ISD respects the due diligence of the district attorney and wholeheartedly agrees that this investigation was without merit,” the district told NBC.

    This marked the end of London’s investigation, but the damage had been done. One of the three targeted librarians left Granbury ISD as a result.

    “These women, that are amazing educators and librarians, have been terrified for over two years now that they’re going to get arrested, hauled off to jail on a felony charge of providing pornography to minors,” Granbury attorney Paul Hyde told NBC. “We lost a great librarian.”

    London’s probe began in May 2022. He previously said it was in response to reports of “pornography” in campus libraries, filed by a homeschooling mother and a future Granbury school board trustee. However, one of the women told NBC reporters that it was London who asked them to file the criminal complaints................

     
    Guess this can go here
    =================
    One mother has been opening up about a new law she has noticed in her public library.

    Carly Anderson recently posted a video on TikTok talking about a visit to the library with her two daughters, one who is 11 years old and the other a year old. “Kids have lost access to public libraries,” she said at the beginning of the clip.

    At the library, her older daughter Scarlett just finished reading The Hobbit and was looking for JRR Tolkien’s follow-up The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which was located in the adult section. However, towards the entrance, there was a large sign that said “Stop.”

    “The sign says that if you are under 18, you’re not allowed up there unless you have an unrestricted library card or your parent that is over 18 signs an affidavit for you,” the mother explained.

    After handing over her ID to prove that she was over 18 years old, she assumed she would then be allowed to go with her daughter. However, the librarian then stopped her again.

    “They said that because I had a baby there (who can’t read), I’m not allowed in the library with her unless she has a library card or I signed an affidavit,” Anderson explained about her one-year-old daughter, Daphne. “So me and Daphne just watched from the edge while Scarlett goes in to find her book. The librarian ended up helping her.”

    The mother did clarify that she didn’t blame the librarians for what was going on saying, “They were being so nice and patient... I felt like the librarians are sick of it. They feel so bad turning kids away from going into the library.”………





     
    The state of Utah has become the first state to completely ban a list of books from schools statewide.

    The edict was issued on Friday and is intended to comply with a law that went into effect on July 1st, which says local education agencies must prioritize “protecting children from the harmful effects of illicit pornography over other considerations.”

    School boards and the governing boards of charter schools are included in local education agencies. The decision takes away the choice from school teachers, administrators, and librarians, who weigh books based on their artistic, cultural, or educational value.

    Any book that has a description of sex or masturbation is considered banned under the new rule, and must be removed. A local education agency must notify the state board of education when it removes a book. When a book is removed by three school districts or by two school districts and five charter schools, it must be removed across the state.

    PEN America Freedom to Read program director Kasey Meehan called it “a dark day for the freedom to read in Utah.” Many of the books on the banned list are from fantasy author Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorn and Roses series, as well as one of her books from her series Throne of Glass.

    Other books banned are Forever by Judy Blume, a graphic novel about a boy moving away from Christianity called Blankets by Craig Thompson, and Tilt, by Ellen Hopkins, which centers three teenagers navigating teen pregnancy and a romantic relationship between two young men, one of whom is HIV positive. Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel Oryx and Crake and Rupi Kaur’s poetry collection Milk and Honey are also banned.

    The ban is unique in the country, which has seen a rapid increase in attempts to ban books, because it is the first time a state is requiring all schools to remove a list of titles.

    “This is different,” said Jonathan Friedman, the managing director of the U.S. Free Expression Programs at PEN America. “This is literally the government saying that Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood, cannot be shelved in public schools.”..................

     
    DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Iowa can enforce a book ban this school year following a Friday ruling by a federal appeals court.

    The U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a district judge’s earlier decision that temporarily halted key parts of the law, including a ban on books depicting sex acts in school libraries and classrooms.

    The law, which the Republican-led Legislature and GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds approved in 2023, also forbids teachers from raising gender identity and sexual orientation issues with younger students.

    Reynolds said in a statement that the ruling reinforces the belief that “it should be parents who decide when and if sexually explicit books are appropriate for their children.”

    “This victory ensures age-appropriate books and curriculum in school classrooms and libraries,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said in a statement. “With this win, parents will no longer have to fear what their kids have access to in schools when they are not around.”……

     
    DENVER — The Elizabeth School District in Elbert County is pulling 19 books from their school library shelves for parental review that officials deemed too controversial, including a book titled “It’s Your World — If You Don’t Like It, Change It: Activism for Teenagers.”

    The new policy, first reported by Colorado Community Media, was unanimously approved by the Elizabeth school board during a Monday meeting.

    The books that have been removed from shelves are:

    —“The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas

    —“Thirteen Reasons Why” by Jay Asher

    —“#Pride: Championing LGBTQ Rights “by Rebecca Felix

    —“You Should See Me in a Crown” by Leah Johnson

    —“It’s Your World — If You Don’t Like It, Change It: Activism for Teenagers” by Mikki Halpin

    —“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini

    —“Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison

    —“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky

    —“Looking for Alaska” by John Green

    —“Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult

    —“Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson

    —“Identical,” “Fallout,” “Glass,” “Burned,” “Crank,” and “Smoke” by Ellen Hopkins

    —“George” by Alex Gino

    A curriculum review committee of school board members, school staff and Elizabeth community members turned to online resources like banned book lists to determine what problematic books the four school libraries have, said Mary Powell, an Elizabeth school board member on the curriculum review committee, during the school board meeting. Then, the committee reviewed the books for graphic violence, sexual content, profanity/obscenity, ideations of self-harm or mental illness, religious viewpoints, drug or excessive alcohol use and racism/discrimination.

    Powell said the removed books had “egregious” examples of those qualities.

    “We need to be sure we are protecting our students from things that are controversial,” Powell said during the school board meeting.

    The policy change also created a new tier of school library books for “sensitive topics.” So far, the district’s curriculum review committee flagged more than 130 books as “sensitive.” If a student checks out one of the “sensitive” books, an email is sent to the student’s parents alerting them. The parent has the option to restrict their kid’s library account, prohibiting the child from checking out books flagged as “sensitive.”

    “We have talked about parents’ rights and responsibilities, and this is an important responsibility,” Powell said. “It’s their right to know what their child is checking out.”

    Books on the “sensitive” list include “1984,” Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Hunger Games,” “Understanding Islam” and the Bible.

    “We are trying to be very aware that not all of us in the school district have the same values,” Powell said. “A parent who does not want their child to read the Bible should be notified that their child checked out the Bible. A parent who doesn’t want their child to read the Quran should be notified that their child checked out the Quran.”............

     
    and on the other end - basically saying these books aren't 'banned' you are free to buy them from any book store or Amazon

    That kind of defeats the purpose of a free lending library though
    ============================================================

    Cast your imagination back and pretend that you are again a child of 5 or 6. You have perhaps lately learned to read for pleasure and are beginning to discover for yourself the wonderful things found in children’s books. You can read about volcanos or trains or talking animals or whatever catches your fancy, and it is exhilarating. Now imagine that a trusted adult gives you a picture book intended to persuade you that some people want to prevent you from reading what you like. Can you believe it?

    These unspecified persons do not merely want to thwart your reading but to stop everyone from reading about topics that anyone finds upsetting. You, for instance, might be fond of avocados or robots, but if someone else finds them yucky or scary then books containing depictions of avocados or robots should be banned. Such runs the reductio ad absurdum message of Raj Haldar’s “This Book Is Banned” (Sourcebooks, 40 pages, $18.99), a picture book illustrated by Julia Patton that is one of a handful of 2023 kids books designed to inculcate progressive attitudes toward the supposedly dangerous trend of “book banning.”

    In the past decade, many parents have watched with distress as critical theories and gender ideology have sluiced into books for young readers and into the schools they attend and the libraries they visit. In 2023 parental objections were met by institutional contempt so intense that some school officials (e.g., in Fairfax County, Va., and Bucks County, Pa.) had themselves sworn into office on stacks of controversial books for young readers. In a coordinated effort, public-school students in Seattle sent angry letters decorated with rainbow flags to parent-activists...............


     
    A public college in Florida tossed hundreds of books in the trash this week, with many of the discarded titles appearing to be related to LGBTQ issues, race and women’s rights.

    Photos and videos posted to social media by a reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune show the books in at least one dumpster and cardboard boxes in parking lots at the New College of Florida.

    The book titles that are visible in the photos include “Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey,” “Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe,” “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom,” “Feminist Thought” and “Race Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip-Hop.”

    New College of Florida defended its actions in discarding the books, describing it as part of “longstanding annual procedures.”

    “The images seen online of a dumpster of library materials is related to the standard weeding process,” the college said in a statement. “Chapter 273 of Florida statutes precludes New College from selling, donating or transferring these materials, which were purchased with state funds. Deselected materials are discarded, through a recycling process when possible.”

    The public college also confirmed that it had discarded books associated with its discontinued gender studies program. New College announced last year that it was dropping the program, several months after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to the college’s board of trustees with the reported aim of changing the college’s culture. In May of last year, at a ceremony held at New College, DeSantis signed a bill into law that banned public universities and colleges in Florida from using state or federal funding for diversity programs.

    “Separate from the New College library weeding its collection, a number of books associated with the discontinued Gender Studies program were removed from a room in Hamilton Center that is being repurposed,” the statement added.

    Bacardi Jackson, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, denounced the disposal of the books in a lengthy and sharp statement on Thursday.

    “These actions are nothing short of a cultural purge, reminiscent of some of history’s darkest times, where regimes sought to control thought by burning books and erasing knowledge,” Jackson wrote. “The fact that these books—sources of wisdom, diverse perspectives, and the narratives of marginalized communities—were discarded in the dead of night, without transparency, and without giving students the opportunity to preserve them, should outrage every Floridian and every American who values democracy and free thought.”............

     
    A public college in Florida tossed hundreds of books in the trash this week, with many of the discarded titles appearing to be related to LGBTQ issues, race and women’s rights.

    Photos and videos posted to social media by a reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune show the books in at least one dumpster and cardboard boxes in parking lots at the New College of Florida.

    The book titles that are visible in the photos include “Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey,” “Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe,” “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom,” “Feminist Thought” and “Race Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip-Hop.”

    New College of Florida defended its actions in discarding the books, describing it as part of “longstanding annual procedures.”

    “The images seen online of a dumpster of library materials is related to the standard weeding process,” the college said in a statement. “Chapter 273 of Florida statutes precludes New College from selling, donating or transferring these materials, which were purchased with state funds. Deselected materials are discarded, through a recycling process when possible.”

    The public college also confirmed that it had discarded books associated with its discontinued gender studies program. New College announced last year that it was dropping the program, several months after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to the college’s board of trustees with the reported aim of changing the college’s culture. In May of last year, at a ceremony held at New College, DeSantis signed a bill into law that banned public universities and colleges in Florida from using state or federal funding for diversity programs.

    “Separate from the New College library weeding its collection, a number of books associated with the discontinued Gender Studies program were removed from a room in Hamilton Center that is being repurposed,” the statement added.

    Bacardi Jackson, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, denounced the disposal of the books in a lengthy and sharp statement on Thursday.

    “These actions are nothing short of a cultural purge, reminiscent of some of history’s darkest times, where regimes sought to control thought by burning books and erasing knowledge,” Jackson wrote. “The fact that these books—sources of wisdom, diverse perspectives, and the narratives of marginalized communities—were discarded in the dead of night, without transparency, and without giving students the opportunity to preserve them, should outrage every Floridian and every American who values democracy and free thought.”............

    A library dean at a Florida college that has been overhauled by state Republicans and their allies has been placed on administrative leave after hundreds of books, many of which contained LGBTQ+ themes, were sent to a landfill last week.

    A spokesperson on Monday confirmed to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, part of the USA TODAY Network, that Shannon Hausinger, New College of Florida's dean of the library, was placed on administrative leave.

    The book disposal and Hausinger's leave are the latest developments at New College, a small liberal arts school in Sarasota that has undergone a significant transformation over the last year as Gov. Ron DeSantis has led a campaign to turn the school into the "Hillsdale College of the South," referencing the private, conservative Christian liberal arts school in Michigan............

     
    Amanda Jones is a Louisiana middle-school librarian who sleeps with a shotgun under her bed and carries a pistol when she travels the back roads.

    Threats against her began two years ago after she spoke out against censorship and was drawn into the culture wars over book banning. She was condemned as a pedophile and a groomer and accused of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” The Christian right targeted her, and she found herself in the news warning that conservatives in her state and across much of the country were endangering libraries and intellectual freedom.

    “I never expected any of this," said Jones, who lives in Livingston Parish. "It’s a huge weight to feel all that attention. I’m just a school librarian from a two red-light town."

    Jones’ cautionary and disquieting testament to the nation's divisiveness is told in her new memoir, “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America,” a blunt, angry, searching and redeeming story about a woman engulfed by forces and designs she never imagined. It is a glimpse into a family and a small town that reads like a chapter out of “The Scarlet Letter” or “The Crucible,” narratives whose themes of fear, superstition, rage and religion are again permeating the nation’s political moment, including Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s recent comments that “Democrats want to put sexually explicit books in toddlers’ libraries.”

    “Our presidential election will determine how far it goes,” Jones said in an interview. “If Trump is elected, Project 2025 [a 900-plus-page conservative manifesto] will take root. It will ramp up the hate. We’ll see a large flight of educators and librarians from their jobs. Trump’s made it OK for people to hate and attack. I noticed it right after the George Floyd protests. People started saying the quiet part out loud.”

    Amid rumors that a Livingston Parish Library board member was questioning the stocking of LGBTQ+ books, Jones stood and spoke against censorship at the July 19, 2022, board meeting. She told the crowd that titles often targeted for banning were about minorities and LGBTQ+ people, or books on sexual health and reproductive rights. She did not mention specific titles, saying that “no one portion of the community should dictate what the rest of the citizens have access to.”

    She added that removing or relocating books on LGBTQ+ themes could be harmful to children and young people seeking to understand their identity. “I grew up in this parish being taught that God is love,” she said. “What I’ve come to realize is that what many people mean is that God is love only if you have the same religious and political beliefs as them... no one on the right side of history has ever been on the side of censorship and hiding books.”

    The attacks were immediate, fierce and confounding. She was labeled a “sicko, pig, trash,” she writes in the memoir. "The sense of betrayal was overwhelming." One message was particularly alarming: “Continue with your LGBT agenda on our children cause we gunna put [you] in the dirt very soon ... You can’t hide. We know where you work + live... you have a LARGE target on your back.”

    “All I did was make a statement on censorship,” she writes, noting that her comments were made at her parish public library and that she never mentioned her school library, “but people were posting like I was handing out copies of Hustler magazine at my school.”

    Jones fell into depression. She said she cried so hard that her eyes swelled shut; she had panic attacks, and her blood pressure spiked. She wondered how to explain the furor to her teenage daughter. She went to a therapist and took a leave of absence from the middle school for a semester. But Jones found it difficult to escape the vitriol aimed at her, including from friends, who, like her, grew up in Christian homes in a town outside Baton Rouge, where kids swam in the creek and the local branch of the library was once “in a room next to a washeteria.”

    A growing number of librarians, like Jones, have been targeted nationwide, including Martha Hickson in Annandale, N.J., and another in Michigan who received abusive phone calls and was tagged as a pedophile in signs posted around her town. State legislatures have proposed bills that would hold libraries accountable to obscenity laws and would make it a crime for librarians and educators to stock books containing sexually explicit images...........






    1724346422237.png
     
    Amanda Jones is a Louisiana middle-school librarian who sleeps with a shotgun under her bed and carries a pistol when she travels the back roads.

    Threats against her began two years ago after she spoke out against censorship and was drawn into the culture wars over book banning. She was condemned as a pedophile and a groomer and accused of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” The Christian right targeted her, and she found herself in the news warning that conservatives in her state and across much of the country were endangering libraries and intellectual freedom.

    “I never expected any of this," said Jones, who lives in Livingston Parish. "It’s a huge weight to feel all that attention. I’m just a school librarian from a two red-light town."

    Jones’ cautionary and disquieting testament to the nation's divisiveness is told in her new memoir, “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America,” a blunt, angry, searching and redeeming story about a woman engulfed by forces and designs she never imagined. It is a glimpse into a family and a small town that reads like a chapter out of “The Scarlet Letter” or “The Crucible,” narratives whose themes of fear, superstition, rage and religion are again permeating the nation’s political moment, including Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s recent comments that “Democrats want to put sexually explicit books in toddlers’ libraries.”

    “Our presidential election will determine how far it goes,” Jones said in an interview. “If Trump is elected, Project 2025 [a 900-plus-page conservative manifesto] will take root. It will ramp up the hate. We’ll see a large flight of educators and librarians from their jobs. Trump’s made it OK for people to hate and attack. I noticed it right after the George Floyd protests. People started saying the quiet part out loud.”

    Amid rumors that a Livingston Parish Library board member was questioning the stocking of LGBTQ+ books, Jones stood and spoke against censorship at the July 19, 2022, board meeting. She told the crowd that titles often targeted for banning were about minorities and LGBTQ+ people, or books on sexual health and reproductive rights. She did not mention specific titles, saying that “no one portion of the community should dictate what the rest of the citizens have access to.”

    She added that removing or relocating books on LGBTQ+ themes could be harmful to children and young people seeking to understand their identity. “I grew up in this parish being taught that God is love,” she said. “What I’ve come to realize is that what many people mean is that God is love only if you have the same religious and political beliefs as them... no one on the right side of history has ever been on the side of censorship and hiding books.”

    The attacks were immediate, fierce and confounding. She was labeled a “sicko, pig, trash,” she writes in the memoir. "The sense of betrayal was overwhelming." One message was particularly alarming: “Continue with your LGBT agenda on our children cause we gunna put [you] in the dirt very soon ... You can’t hide. We know where you work + live... you have a LARGE target on your back.”

    “All I did was make a statement on censorship,” she writes, noting that her comments were made at her parish public library and that she never mentioned her school library, “but people were posting like I was handing out copies of Hustler magazine at my school.”

    Jones fell into depression. She said she cried so hard that her eyes swelled shut; she had panic attacks, and her blood pressure spiked. She wondered how to explain the furor to her teenage daughter. She went to a therapist and took a leave of absence from the middle school for a semester. But Jones found it difficult to escape the vitriol aimed at her, including from friends, who, like her, grew up in Christian homes in a town outside Baton Rouge, where kids swam in the creek and the local branch of the library was once “in a room next to a washeteria.”

    A growing number of librarians, like Jones, have been targeted nationwide, including Martha Hickson in Annandale, N.J., and another in Michigan who received abusive phone calls and was tagged as a pedophile in signs posted around her town. State legislatures have proposed bills that would hold libraries accountable to obscenity laws and would make it a crime for librarians and educators to stock books containing sexually explicit images...........






    1724346422237.png
    What is wrong with people. This pisses me off so much. To thread bodily harm against a librarian is ridiculous.
     
    What is wrong with people. This pisses me off so much. To thread bodily harm against a librarian is ridiculous.
    Remember when the stereotype of librarians was harmless, mousy spinsters (usually wearing cat's eye glasses) and not devious, child corrupting groomers?
     
    Oklahoma’s education board has revoked the license of a former teacher who drew national attentionduring surging book-ban efforts across the U.S. in 2022 when she covered part of her classroom bookshelf in red tape with the words “Books the state didn’t want you to read.”

    The decision Thursday went against a judge who had advised the Oklahoma Board of Education not to revoke the license of Summer Boismier, who had also put in her high school classroom a QR code of the Brooklyn Public Library’s catalogue of banned books.

    An attorney for Boismier, who now works at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City, told reporters after the board meeting that they would seek to overturn the decision.

    “I will not apologize for sharing publicly available information about library access with my students,” the former teacher posted on X. “My livelihood will never be as important as someone’s life or right to read what they want.”

    Brady Henderson, Boismier’s attorney, and the office of Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters did not immediately respond to phone messages seeking comment Friday.

    Boismier, a fervent reader with a passion for fantasy novels, had been teaching English for nine years when she was involuntarily thrust into the center of Walters’ campaign for statewide office in August 2022.

    She received threats on social media and was accused of being part of a broader movement led by teachers to influence children’s political beliefs. Boismier resigned soon after.…..

     
    McALLEN — On May 17, with just one week to go until the end of the school year, the superintendent of the South Texas Mission school district received an email with a list of 676 books a group of local pastors believed were “filthy and evil.”

    The email came from the personal assistant of Pastor Luis Cabrera, who leads a church in Harlingen, about 30 miles east of the Mission school district.

    The email was clear. Cabrera and “the community” wanted them removed.

    The email cited state law, House Bill 900, that requires vendors to rate their books and materials for appropriateness, based on the presence of sex depictions or references, before selling them to school libraries.

    Despite that law being blocked by a federal appeals court, then-superintendent of the Mission school district, Carol G. Perez, replied within five minutes that the district would check to see if they had the books to remove them.

    Later that evening, Deputy Superintendent Sharon A. Roberts asked the district’s director for instructional technology and library services, Marissa I. Saenz, to look into removing them.

    “Can you prioritize researching these books to ensure we remove them from the school libraries? Can your IT coaches help you track the location of the books to expedite this request?” Roberts wrote in an email.

    The emails, which The Texas Tribune obtained through an open records request, offer a window into how close the 14,500-student district was to removing a trove of books over the summer break. It also illustrates the continued pressure — public and private — school leaders in every corner of the state face over access to books that discuss race, religion and LGBTQ+ themes.

    School district and community libraries have been inundated with requests since 2020, following the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s death. The public backlash started in the suburbs of Dallas. But communities large and small have wrestled with these questions.............


     
    Amanda Jones deserves a better subtitle for her new book, “That Librarian.” The anodyne “The Fight Against Book Banning in America” fails to capture the flavor or thrust of this intensely personal and often harrowing book.

    Please allow me, then, to offer Jones’s publisher a few suggestions for a more accurate (and compelling) subtitle for the eventual paperback edition of the book: “The Memoir and Manifesto of a Freedom Fighter,” “Dispatches From the Trenches of America’s Culture War,” “Jousting With Trolls, Telling My Story, and Defending the Freedom to Read.”

    Any of these would be better. This is, after all, a book that begins with a death threat leveled at Jones because … she opposed censorship in her local public libraries in rural Louisiana. Jones’s fortitude in the face of such intimidation, and her subsequent work as a spokeswoman for libraries and library patrons, make for an important and engrossing story.

    Jones, a middle-school librarian in Watson, La., first ran afoul of right-wing activists when she testified at a meeting of the library board of Livingston Parish (the Louisiana equivalent of her local county) in July 2022. Her testimony, printed in full at the end of the book, was a measured and cogent argument for allowing public libraries to follow their own well-established policies in creating and curating balanced, broad collections of books and other materials.

    “All members of our community deserve to be seen, have access to information, and see themselves in our PUBLIC library collection,” she said that evening. “Censoring and relocating books and displays is harmful to our community, but will be extremely harmful to our most vulnerable — our children.”

    Within a few weeks of her testimony, right-wing activists (primarily from an organization with the Orwellian name Citizens for a New Louisiana) had pilloried Jones online, falsely accusing her of, among other things, peddling pornography to children and advocating the teaching of anal sex to 11-year-olds. Then came the death threat.

    The tactics used against Jones and her parish’s libraries will be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to political discourse or the media in the last decade, and particularly to anyone who has tracked the assaults on public and school libraries in recent years.

    The tactics are four-pronged: 1) decontextualize quotations or excerpts from books; 2) launch relentless and ruthless personal attacks from the safety and relative anonymity of social media; 3) invoke the safety of children as a rationale for censorship; and 4) lie shamelessly.

    Jones documents the painful personal effects of these tactics — she saw several friendships crumble, and at one point in the middle of the crisis she had to take a leave of absence from her job to safeguard her mental health. But she also recounts her decision to fight back, filing a civil suit charging her attackers with defamation and becoming an unofficial national spokeswoman for the freedom to read.

    Jones has maintained her sense of humor through this ordeal, and that humor leavens what is at times a difficult read. In response to right-wing claims that she and other librarians and teachers are indoctrinating children with liberal worldviews, Jones writes, “If I had the ability to indoctrinate children, I would indoctrinate them to be kind to one another, return their library books on time, and stop putting their chicken nuggets from the cafeteria in the book-return box.”..........



     
    I grew up not far from Watson... Yea, Livingston Parish is one of those places where a large number of people still have their pointy white hoods in their closets, its one of those places where tolerance is frowned upon. i moved from the LP 25 years ago, and have rarely been back to visit..
     
    A group of major book publishers sued the state of Florida over what they call an “unconstitutional” book ban law that allows challenges to books in school libraries.

    Six publishers — Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks — along with The Authors Guild and some prominent book authors, filed the 94-page lawsuit Thursday in federal court in Orlando.

    In the suit, they argued book bans have surged, in violation of the First Amendment, because of the passage of Florida’s 2023 education bill, H.B. 1069. The bill allows parents to try to remove materials from schools if they are seen as pornographic by the school boards.

    With the legislation’s passing last year, the plaintiffs argued Florida “has mandated that school districts impose a regime of strict censorship in school libraries.” They added that the law “requires school districts to remove library books without regard to their literary, artistic, political, scientific, or educational value when taken as a whole.”

    The complaint stated that hundreds of books have been banned, including “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens and “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank.

    “By so broadly regulating the display and availability of books that are constitutionally protected as to at least a significant number of students, these restrictions—as interpreted and enforced by the State of Florida—violate the First Amendment because they are impermissibly overbroad content-based restrictions,” they said in the lawsuit……..

     

    Create an account or login to comment

    You must be a member in order to leave a comment

    Create account

    Create an account on our community. It's easy!

    Log in

    Already have an account? Log in here.

    General News Feed

    Fact Checkers News Feed

    Back
    Top Bottom