Among the myriad false charges against Gov. Sarah Palin has been that she tried to ban books in our public libraries. As Michelle Malkin reports and the Anchorage Daily News now admits:
…Were any books censored or banned? June Pinell-Stephens, chairwoman of the Alaska Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee since 1984, checked her files … and came up empty-handed.
Let’s look a tad closer at the banned book charge.
Mayor Palin allegedly asked the Wasilla librarian what she would do if people were “circling the library in protest” of a book. A fair question to the administrator of our repository of public inquiry – a library.
The librarian reportedly stiffened in her chair and retorted that as a veteran professional librarian she would call “the ACLU” to defend her right to shelve or eliminate those books she deemed valuable.
In my view, that response was both defiant and defective.
Gov. Palin’s question might have immediately reminded librarian Mary Ellen Emmons of the 1900s when women picketed for the vote, workers picketed for living wages and safety conditions, and later when blacks picketed for the right to public accommodations.
Picketing has long been the “speech” of law-abiding citizens against elitist authorities.
As a public servant, Ms. Emmons should have said she would ask the picketers to explain their grievances. Were some library decisions violating what these folks saw as their rights? She would be on inquiry.
Instead, the head librarian showed no interest in why citizens might resort to picket speech around their own library. Ms. Emmon’s response reflects decades of Library Science professors who have likened public protesters to storm troopers waiting to burn Shakespeare or Milton.
But who really bans America’s books and publications?
For the last five decades, the far-left American Publisher Association and satellites like the American Library Association have controlled almost all American publishing and mass media, stripping citizens of their rightful authority over their own community libraries.
Committee of 20 decide over 3/4 of American information
On July 30, 1984, the chairman of Freedom to Read Committee of the Association of American Publishers, or AAP, Heather Florence, wrote to Congress. She demanded Congress pre-censor research that would examine causes in the escalation of child sexual abuse (public disclosure here – it was my research).
Without a blush, Ms. Florence laid her censorship clout before the Congress, saying the AAP represents “more than 300 publisher-members of our Association, whose publishing houses account for well over three-fourths of books, educational materials and software” in the U.S.
Although the Internet has cut into AAP’s control, its subject librarians still decide what books, films, magazines, videos, and Internet content are good for our citizens. This special interest collective, run by “the 20,” pre-censor (control) almost all information and education in the USA. The AAP website states:
AAP’s mandate covers … issues important to all publishers as well as issues of specific concern to particular segments of the industry … censorship … funding for education and libraries … elementary and secondary instructional materials; higher education publishing; Professional and Scholarly Publishing; and the international marketplace. (Emphasis added.)
The “AAP policy is set by a 20-member Board of Directors.” The “particular segments of the industry” includes Big Pornography, which helps finance the AAP. The AAP represents Big Pornography’s interests in “education and libraries.”
Translation? Twenty people, financially obliged to Big Pornography, determine over three-fourths of the information allowed in our schools and public libraries. College educated librarians, trained largely by AAP and ALA mavens and their “instructional materials,” also decide on the other one-fourth that makes it through.
The ACLU, ALA and AAP have fought to legalize child pornography. The ACLU and ALA are warriors for Big Pornography’s library rights, since Playboy et al. have funded these agencies.
Public libraries are now private duchies
Parents nationwide have been incensed that our libraries are increasingly dirty book stores. Those who have followed the controversy are aware that children’s books often ooze with violent, coarse, sadistic, pornographic descriptions of oral sodomy, incest, copulation, rape, murder, bestiality, cannibalism, drug use, etc.
Children have been molested and raped in library bathrooms and elevators by pornography-high predators. Despite repeated congressional censure, ALA imperialist librarians still resist filtering Internet child pornography.
With this background, how dare a mere town mayor question the decisions of a veteran ALA duchess who views the public library as her private duchy?
As mayor, Sarah Palin’s censorship question was right on.
