To regain the confidence of our users and of society, librarians need to recognize when their own activist bias results in a reduction of access to certain viewpoints.
Of all places, Blue Hill. I tend to think of Maine as sane moderates' heaven. Or it might be that the library doesn't want young progressives from everywhere (and even from "away") marching into town, blocking traffic, and screaming.
If only librarians, teachers, et al. would see things the way J.K. Rowling does: Dress as you please, love whom you want -- but please do not expect the world at large to pretend that gender is assigned, that brawny young men can say they're women and get to swim in women's meets or inhabit women's safe spaces or prisons -- or that 10-year-olds know who they are and what they want from year to year.
This last especially. As a teacher of almost 40 years who often taught the same groups of kids in middle and then upper school, or even in sixth and then seventh grade, it was fun to see how their ideas, goals, peeves, and even nicknames change over the years.
Starting hormones at 12 and undergoing life-changing surgery at 17? I certainly hope Abigail Shrier's book stays on the shelves.
Which doesn't at all mean I want the Christian Right dictating what can be read.
Thank you for this excellent article. As a publisher of children's fiction that is centered in traditional values, not social agendas, we've seen these shadow bans and pre-censorship firsthand. It's extremely prevalent - especially in the children's section of libraries. 'Old' books that portray traditional values have been weeded out to make room for the 'new' books that support what publishers and librarians want kids to read. The shift has made libraries extremely one-sided in viewpoints. Many thousands of families across the nation no longer take their kids to the library. What a shame! We need to right the ship.
Thank You - This is so important! "Resisting ideological conformity matters too." Without different points of view, we lose our ability to think critically or engage in honest debate.
"Book banning" is a dysphemism used by the Left for selecting age-appropriate books for K-12 schools and libraries. It's time for Americans to start boycotting libraries and bookstores that practice bans and censorship. They have been captured by the far left and should be defunded and all support removed until they can be reformed.
I like to read books from very far left to very far right so that I can try to understand where people are coming from when they argue. Sometimes, I can hate everything about a book or the ideas, but I may come away with a better understanding or even find a little sliver of something worth keeping. It does me no harm to read perspectives I don't share as long as I'm not assigned to read them. And, I don't know if librarians know this or not, but one of my sons hates to read. I promise that putting a book on the shelves will not force a person to retain the material. This needs to be fixed.
Thank you. I will look at this. He is 28 and autistic. He can read words, but the main ideas get lost in translation somehow. I still read to him, which he likes and comprehends (no higher than maybe 8th or 9th grade books). My youngest son reads like I do, but they did have different teachers and I've never thought that maybe he just didn't get it the first go round. I am all up for giving a new method a try. I'm actually excited to learn about this.
Thank you for sharing your story. Perhaps you can find something in the science of reading. It is a tricky thing. If you cannot read most of life is troublesome for you. Apparently there is good news that this reading called “decoding” has good results for dyslexic learners.
I noticed you didn't mention the bias in the higher education of future librarians. They are now being trained specifically to be social justice activists in their work, as are graduate students in many other humanities disciplines. It is no wonder that the younger ones are exhibiting such bias, at least.
That is very unfortunate. The progressive religion trains people to be activists for their causes. These people have no idea they are wrong or that there are dimensions of thought apart from their pet viewpoints, immature but sure of themselves.
I don't know what must be done to stem the inculcating of an activist mentality in students from elementary school up. And of course that mentality assumes that those who disagree are simply benighted enemies to be defeated rather than people offering alternative views that ought to be used to critique and reflect on their own positions.
It's even worse. They sincerely believe that any hint of disagreement is "literally murdering trans people" so they have all the fanaticism of the righteous.
I am a member of FAIR Alberta. Several years ago, having suspected these censorship issues were happening at my library, I created an annual event called Book Burning. (This was with an atheist group I had belonged to.) I even found a large cauldron to rent and bought several camping headlamps to flash at different times to imitate the fire. Tissue paper for the flames.
The events were held in a pub, and once in the downtown library. It was to celebrate Canada’s Freedom to Read Week. My board members read from challenged and banned books and we spoke of why we felt this was ridiculous nonsense, dangerous nonsense to censor books.
I no longer belong to the atheist group that held these events because…..yes, they became woke.
The rise of censorship by librarians and publishing company “censorship readers” I find abhorrent.
Around 1993 I began my digging into the censorship issue when a series of readers, The Impressions Series, was removed from my daughter’s school. (Calgary) My daughter, in Grade 5 at that time, was furious. She loved those books.
If we take a Birds Eye view of this it is clearly a dystopian Marxist ideology.
I recently read a book about the Russian revolution through to the fall of the ussr.
The signs are all here for us to see what is happening. Erasing history, they are the ones removing books that do not adhere to their ideology. When they changed leaders they rewrote the history and accused innocents of being dissidents against the state, including farmers, landowners, Christians, Jews,or just anyone they felt threatened their power. Including pitting husband against wife, children against parents, taking children from their parents.
Citizens lived in constant fear, afraid to speak.
We need to identify how the librarians were captured by such a censorious viewpoint as they accuse others of being the censor.
This is a dangerous precedent every where we look today.
I think independent thinkers are bailing ship in disgust, leaving incompetents and indoctrinated people to control our free market institutions.
I'm an aficionado of "banned books", and publishers imprisoned.
I collect and study modern period pornography (Traveler's Companion) particularly gay pornography, which is a fascinating window on an era of incrediby rapid social change. Since for men "gay" is defined as sexual attraction to other men, reality is that literature without sex can never really give depth to the life of gay men. This is a wonderful paradox for literature which is not usually considered to be anything but superficial and sensational.
I've got 35 feet of Globe Wernicke bookcases stacked 9 feet high, every size they made, stuffed with books - rows of American Library Poe and Cooper shoulder to shoulder with "Tailpipe Truckers", "Rigid and Ready", "Cocky Cruisers" (always charmingly alliterative). The authors were not writing just under a pseudonym, the apparent name for many was also a pseudonym. They and the publishers were under not only a threat of arrest, but one of better series publishers were arrested, imprisoned, offices and manuscripts destroyed, _several times_. Book banning? Cancel culture? My father's best friend thew himself under a train for being exposed as gay during government sweeps in the 50's [My father was himself targeted by McCarthy for being un-American]
A mere bagatelle. But, why is this germane?
Freedom to read in Public Libraties has forever been subject to curatorial control. I remember the British Museum's (British Library) collection of erotica "Private Case" books were not accessible the summer I spent in London in 1987. My goodness! Fanny Hill! Needless to say, outside of a gay bookstore (which are becoming fewer and further between) I've never found a book describing what it's like to be gay and enjoy what is part of the core of being gay. Public Library? Forget it.
Public Libraries by definition are an extremely conservative institution. Librarians are the curae of accepted ideas in written form, useful information in service of conversation and education intelligence as Benjamin Franklin in the US might say. Why should a library serve any purpose other than that of being a repository of useful books for the widest c'mon denominator of the public which can be shared?
I don't confuse public libraries with a bookstores.
Because as much as I enjoy books, and libraries have been important to me, I would never expect a library to house any possible book.
Fortunately, never in history have more books been available to more people with the most extreme ranges of ideas at the lowest imaginable prices. That's a fact with Amazon and Bookfinder. Project Gutenbetg with machine translation - for free - provides the entire body of pre-1970's copyright literature in virtually all major and minor languages available to anyone in their hand in their language 24x7. Astonishing. Granted I do find fabulous printed ephemera on 60's social movements at Bolerium Books in San Francisco [they loved my machine generated hardcore gay pornographic novels which I attached to congressional Republicans - it was a good laugh - they saw only a fragment of the 65000 I generated before turning off that AI]
I don’t even have to look, you’re very sweet 💘 my robots have been scanning worldcat for years, many thanks! Those books are not actually in _public_ libraries per se, public lending libraries - with one exception those are private institutions. Please don’t tell Abbott that Texas owns a copy of “Trucker’s Trick”. USC has the One Institute collection of GLB materials which is superb. I haven’t tried to correct it but worldcat also has incorrect data.
You're welcome, you are correct that not all Libraries are on Worldcat. Special collections at large universities will let you view them onsite though. Why not bequeath your collection ro a university special collections dept, which would likely be named after you and preserved for ages for future connoisseurs / researchers?
I haven’t decided how to preserve them. They are pulp fiction, the glue is poor and the ultra-high-acid pages are as fragile as the Dead Sea scrolls. I have digitally remastered the complete published output of the artists Bill Ward, and Rex, as well as holding their last few hundred originals. I’m working on Adam and Domino. The books I used to buy for 3/$5, they now run from $50-$250 each. I used them to train a GPT-3, given a phrase like “Muscle Mechanic” it will write, typeset, create cover art for a book in the style of the period in around 20 minutes, I made about 60,000 to test the system. The version on GPT-4 is flawless. I’m trying to figure out essentially how to make them immortal, embedded in AI tools, an endless supply by the same authors so that period is never forgotten or deletable, hidden in plain sight in essential tools, recalled like a ghost at will. I wish for them to survive giving pleasure, not as antiquities. Still working out the system. I’ve been able to convert drawings into photorealistic characters, animated by the tools that make Disney films. I ultimately decided it would be more fruitful for current generation young artists to re-interpret the ideas, and I have two books of drawings I will publish at some point.
I’m blathering. I’ll put the tools on a page sometime. I built a prototype AI a few years back that does risqué Tarot card readings based on a deck I collaborated with a photographer friend on, with generative ambient music from the AI. You can converse with it verbally - the Tarot Reader is lusty rusty. I’ll share a link if curious.
You really truly love these books. What you are doing sounds Amazing. I love that you are adding lusty rusty as a ghost in the machine for future humans. ☆☆☆☆☆ Inspiring! ✊🏼✊🏽✊🏿
You’re very kind. If you’d like a link to some of my revivals, and new digital projects feel free to send an email to sufeitzy@gmail.com and I’ll send links along.
Stephen King rallied against these bans on Twitter, urging school children to get their hands on banned books. King wrote: “Hey, kids! It's your old buddy Steve King telling you that if they ban a book in your school, haul your ass to the nearest bookstore or library ASAP and find out what they don't want you to read.”
The comment I wrote here got tossed somehow (browser switched windows unexpectedly) so if an incomplete comment shows up here you will see what I tried to express.
I do suspect King here is talking about progressive books. The trope about "people are trying to prevent you from reading this!" is very successful at generating interest in the banned material, even though the reason for the ban is because the material is age-inappropriate, sexually explicit, or hawks some CRT ideology to indoctrinate students.
Yet material that might provide viewpoint diversity is shadow-banned because nobody is even proposing it as part of the curriculum. And any thing smacking of Christian thought doesn't even achieve the status of being shadow banned. We should and have to provide a school environment where people of all faiths or none are welcome, but at the same time you need Christian viewpoints to interrogate some of the other ideas people are being taught in school or absorbing from the culture.
People now suffer from religious illiteracy and their sole image of Christians is that of "anti-gay/anti-trans bigots" or MAGA Trump supporters. Throw in a few high profile hypocrite preachers to round that out. The vast array of really great Christian thought is omitted from the picture.
As you and I probably agree, Christian writing has much to offer. There's a tricky dilemna because we desire public schools to be welcoming to all people, but in service of that we omit Christian thinking and simultaneously allow a raft of other ideas to permeate classrooms. The sanity featured in good Christian writing is omitted but students swim in a sea of other ideas and aren't educated enough in Christian thought to make intelligent comparisons.
And these same students suffer and flounder lacking ideas to inform their decisions and explain their world.
Let's do the same for the books libraries are shadow banning and censoring. Go out and buy them. I suggest reading "Unwoke" by Ted Cruz and "Letter to the American Church" by Eric Metaxas. Also "Unsettled" by Steven Koonin. There are so many more.
"To defend the library, he asked for help from the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, from which he received no reply."
I feel it is important to clarify that ALA did, in fact, provide very real assistance. A member of the Office of Intellectual Freedom met with me and the board member chairing the Collections and Services Committee and offered very useful guidance, as well as explicit support for the library's actions. ALA fell short on following through with a promised letter of support, however. We only learned that this was the result of 'internal debate' from the NY Times article.
It's also important to remember that ALA was dealing with a ten-fold increase in requests for assistance at the time, from around 200-300 annually for the last two decades, to nearly 2,000 in 2021. That trend has continued since then.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this subject. -Rich Boulet
As usual, FAIR takes a one-sided stance on divisive topics, conveniently ignoring the fact that the right has gone just as far as the left in attempts to ban, banish and censor. I had hoped that Fair would eventually emerge as a platform that transcended bias and made an attempt to promote objectivity. Instead, it has become just another one-sided conservative echo chamber.
As a college professor, I see many students who read few things longer than a tweet. A poll revealed that most of our students do not know where our library currently is (it moved during renovation) let alone set foot inside. They just do not use libraries in this era of 'internet in your pocket.' When I enter public libraries I see mainly senior citizens reading periodicals & using free computers as well as mothers with little children in 'play areas' (especially on rainy days). I do not see many teens or twenty-somethings who are the target audience of the books in question.
So I wonder how do the ideologies of librarians/libraries align with the ideologies of _people who actually use libraries_?
Of all places, Blue Hill. I tend to think of Maine as sane moderates' heaven. Or it might be that the library doesn't want young progressives from everywhere (and even from "away") marching into town, blocking traffic, and screaming.
If only librarians, teachers, et al. would see things the way J.K. Rowling does: Dress as you please, love whom you want -- but please do not expect the world at large to pretend that gender is assigned, that brawny young men can say they're women and get to swim in women's meets or inhabit women's safe spaces or prisons -- or that 10-year-olds know who they are and what they want from year to year.
This last especially. As a teacher of almost 40 years who often taught the same groups of kids in middle and then upper school, or even in sixth and then seventh grade, it was fun to see how their ideas, goals, peeves, and even nicknames change over the years.
Starting hormones at 12 and undergoing life-changing surgery at 17? I certainly hope Abigail Shrier's book stays on the shelves.
Which doesn't at all mean I want the Christian Right dictating what can be read.
Thank you for this excellent article. As a publisher of children's fiction that is centered in traditional values, not social agendas, we've seen these shadow bans and pre-censorship firsthand. It's extremely prevalent - especially in the children's section of libraries. 'Old' books that portray traditional values have been weeded out to make room for the 'new' books that support what publishers and librarians want kids to read. The shift has made libraries extremely one-sided in viewpoints. Many thousands of families across the nation no longer take their kids to the library. What a shame! We need to right the ship.
A very well written article, be great if it could appear as an opinion piece in the NYT or some such.
Agreed! More widespread knowledge that this censorship is happening would increase skepticism and perhaps a good dose of indignation.
Thank You - This is so important! "Resisting ideological conformity matters too." Without different points of view, we lose our ability to think critically or engage in honest debate.
"Book banning" is a dysphemism used by the Left for selecting age-appropriate books for K-12 schools and libraries. It's time for Americans to start boycotting libraries and bookstores that practice bans and censorship. They have been captured by the far left and should be defunded and all support removed until they can be reformed.
My last trip to my favourite small, independent bookstore to,d me they wouldn’t receive any books older than 5 years. Pardon me?!?
This in reference to giving books to them for re-selling. Guess that rules out Farenheit 451, or Animal Farm.
I disagree. Boycotting and defunding will only fan the flames of polarization. More dialogue and criticism is what we need.
I like to read books from very far left to very far right so that I can try to understand where people are coming from when they argue. Sometimes, I can hate everything about a book or the ideas, but I may come away with a better understanding or even find a little sliver of something worth keeping. It does me no harm to read perspectives I don't share as long as I'm not assigned to read them. And, I don't know if librarians know this or not, but one of my sons hates to read. I promise that putting a book on the shelves will not force a person to retain the material. This needs to be fixed.
Possibly your son hates to read (as I did) because of the way he was being taught to read.
A series of ideas in “Sold a Story” is excellent. It shows that there is a science of reading.
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
I know a new teacher in our elementary system who, when queried, said that he did not receive any classes on how to teach children to read.
Thank you. I will look at this. He is 28 and autistic. He can read words, but the main ideas get lost in translation somehow. I still read to him, which he likes and comprehends (no higher than maybe 8th or 9th grade books). My youngest son reads like I do, but they did have different teachers and I've never thought that maybe he just didn't get it the first go round. I am all up for giving a new method a try. I'm actually excited to learn about this.
Thank you for sharing your story. Perhaps you can find something in the science of reading. It is a tricky thing. If you cannot read most of life is troublesome for you. Apparently there is good news that this reading called “decoding” has good results for dyslexic learners.
Excellent article!
I noticed you didn't mention the bias in the higher education of future librarians. They are now being trained specifically to be social justice activists in their work, as are graduate students in many other humanities disciplines. It is no wonder that the younger ones are exhibiting such bias, at least.
That is very unfortunate. The progressive religion trains people to be activists for their causes. These people have no idea they are wrong or that there are dimensions of thought apart from their pet viewpoints, immature but sure of themselves.
I don't know what must be done to stem the inculcating of an activist mentality in students from elementary school up. And of course that mentality assumes that those who disagree are simply benighted enemies to be defeated rather than people offering alternative views that ought to be used to critique and reflect on their own positions.
It's even worse. They sincerely believe that any hint of disagreement is "literally murdering trans people" so they have all the fanaticism of the righteous.
I am a member of FAIR Alberta. Several years ago, having suspected these censorship issues were happening at my library, I created an annual event called Book Burning. (This was with an atheist group I had belonged to.) I even found a large cauldron to rent and bought several camping headlamps to flash at different times to imitate the fire. Tissue paper for the flames.
The events were held in a pub, and once in the downtown library. It was to celebrate Canada’s Freedom to Read Week. My board members read from challenged and banned books and we spoke of why we felt this was ridiculous nonsense, dangerous nonsense to censor books.
I no longer belong to the atheist group that held these events because…..yes, they became woke.
The rise of censorship by librarians and publishing company “censorship readers” I find abhorrent.
Around 1993 I began my digging into the censorship issue when a series of readers, The Impressions Series, was removed from my daughter’s school. (Calgary) My daughter, in Grade 5 at that time, was furious. She loved those books.
If we take a Birds Eye view of this it is clearly a dystopian Marxist ideology.
I recently read a book about the Russian revolution through to the fall of the ussr.
The signs are all here for us to see what is happening. Erasing history, they are the ones removing books that do not adhere to their ideology. When they changed leaders they rewrote the history and accused innocents of being dissidents against the state, including farmers, landowners, Christians, Jews,or just anyone they felt threatened their power. Including pitting husband against wife, children against parents, taking children from their parents.
Citizens lived in constant fear, afraid to speak.
We need to identify how the librarians were captured by such a censorious viewpoint as they accuse others of being the censor.
This is a dangerous precedent every where we look today.
I think independent thinkers are bailing ship in disgust, leaving incompetents and indoctrinated people to control our free market institutions.
I'm an aficionado of "banned books", and publishers imprisoned.
I collect and study modern period pornography (Traveler's Companion) particularly gay pornography, which is a fascinating window on an era of incrediby rapid social change. Since for men "gay" is defined as sexual attraction to other men, reality is that literature without sex can never really give depth to the life of gay men. This is a wonderful paradox for literature which is not usually considered to be anything but superficial and sensational.
I've got 35 feet of Globe Wernicke bookcases stacked 9 feet high, every size they made, stuffed with books - rows of American Library Poe and Cooper shoulder to shoulder with "Tailpipe Truckers", "Rigid and Ready", "Cocky Cruisers" (always charmingly alliterative). The authors were not writing just under a pseudonym, the apparent name for many was also a pseudonym. They and the publishers were under not only a threat of arrest, but one of better series publishers were arrested, imprisoned, offices and manuscripts destroyed, _several times_. Book banning? Cancel culture? My father's best friend thew himself under a train for being exposed as gay during government sweeps in the 50's [My father was himself targeted by McCarthy for being un-American]
A mere bagatelle. But, why is this germane?
Freedom to read in Public Libraties has forever been subject to curatorial control. I remember the British Museum's (British Library) collection of erotica "Private Case" books were not accessible the summer I spent in London in 1987. My goodness! Fanny Hill! Needless to say, outside of a gay bookstore (which are becoming fewer and further between) I've never found a book describing what it's like to be gay and enjoy what is part of the core of being gay. Public Library? Forget it.
Public Libraries by definition are an extremely conservative institution. Librarians are the curae of accepted ideas in written form, useful information in service of conversation and education intelligence as Benjamin Franklin in the US might say. Why should a library serve any purpose other than that of being a repository of useful books for the widest c'mon denominator of the public which can be shared?
I don't confuse public libraries with a bookstores.
Because as much as I enjoy books, and libraries have been important to me, I would never expect a library to house any possible book.
Fortunately, never in history have more books been available to more people with the most extreme ranges of ideas at the lowest imaginable prices. That's a fact with Amazon and Bookfinder. Project Gutenbetg with machine translation - for free - provides the entire body of pre-1970's copyright literature in virtually all major and minor languages available to anyone in their hand in their language 24x7. Astonishing. Granted I do find fabulous printed ephemera on 60's social movements at Bolerium Books in San Francisco [they loved my machine generated hardcore gay pornographic novels which I attached to congressional Republicans - it was a good laugh - they saw only a fragment of the 65000 I generated before turning off that AI]
This fight seems overblown on both sides.
Call me when the library has "Trucker's Trick".
https://share.mylio.com/92972098b2eb4bdd419d8ae8abe88180671b965c/217bb1720970f170312b41d9ac33f1e5f8f6443b/
Here you go
3 editions in 11 libraries, perhaps one of them is near you?
https://search.worldcat.org/title/54674865?oclcNum=54674865
I don’t even have to look, you’re very sweet 💘 my robots have been scanning worldcat for years, many thanks! Those books are not actually in _public_ libraries per se, public lending libraries - with one exception those are private institutions. Please don’t tell Abbott that Texas owns a copy of “Trucker’s Trick”. USC has the One Institute collection of GLB materials which is superb. I haven’t tried to correct it but worldcat also has incorrect data.
I am perhaps overly organized.
https://share.mylio.com/92972098b2eb4bdd419d8ae8abe88180671b965c/664ee3a8d291e5695cd6a155c340a8213047a89e/
You're welcome, you are correct that not all Libraries are on Worldcat. Special collections at large universities will let you view them onsite though. Why not bequeath your collection ro a university special collections dept, which would likely be named after you and preserved for ages for future connoisseurs / researchers?
I haven’t decided how to preserve them. They are pulp fiction, the glue is poor and the ultra-high-acid pages are as fragile as the Dead Sea scrolls. I have digitally remastered the complete published output of the artists Bill Ward, and Rex, as well as holding their last few hundred originals. I’m working on Adam and Domino. The books I used to buy for 3/$5, they now run from $50-$250 each. I used them to train a GPT-3, given a phrase like “Muscle Mechanic” it will write, typeset, create cover art for a book in the style of the period in around 20 minutes, I made about 60,000 to test the system. The version on GPT-4 is flawless. I’m trying to figure out essentially how to make them immortal, embedded in AI tools, an endless supply by the same authors so that period is never forgotten or deletable, hidden in plain sight in essential tools, recalled like a ghost at will. I wish for them to survive giving pleasure, not as antiquities. Still working out the system. I’ve been able to convert drawings into photorealistic characters, animated by the tools that make Disney films. I ultimately decided it would be more fruitful for current generation young artists to re-interpret the ideas, and I have two books of drawings I will publish at some point.
I’m blathering. I’ll put the tools on a page sometime. I built a prototype AI a few years back that does risqué Tarot card readings based on a deck I collaborated with a photographer friend on, with generative ambient music from the AI. You can converse with it verbally - the Tarot Reader is lusty rusty. I’ll share a link if curious.
You really truly love these books. What you are doing sounds Amazing. I love that you are adding lusty rusty as a ghost in the machine for future humans. ☆☆☆☆☆ Inspiring! ✊🏼✊🏽✊🏿
You’re very kind. If you’d like a link to some of my revivals, and new digital projects feel free to send an email to sufeitzy@gmail.com and I’ll send links along.
FYI if you have never heard of the named keynote speaker he is an out and very proud Marxist, so the bias is built in.
Stephen King rallied against these bans on Twitter, urging school children to get their hands on banned books. King wrote: “Hey, kids! It's your old buddy Steve King telling you that if they ban a book in your school, haul your ass to the nearest bookstore or library ASAP and find out what they don't want you to read.”
The comment I wrote here got tossed somehow (browser switched windows unexpectedly) so if an incomplete comment shows up here you will see what I tried to express.
I do suspect King here is talking about progressive books. The trope about "people are trying to prevent you from reading this!" is very successful at generating interest in the banned material, even though the reason for the ban is because the material is age-inappropriate, sexually explicit, or hawks some CRT ideology to indoctrinate students.
Yet material that might provide viewpoint diversity is shadow-banned because nobody is even proposing it as part of the curriculum. And any thing smacking of Christian thought doesn't even achieve the status of being shadow banned. We should and have to provide a school environment where people of all faiths or none are welcome, but at the same time you need Christian viewpoints to interrogate some of the other ideas people are being taught in school or absorbing from the culture.
People now suffer from religious illiteracy and their sole image of Christians is that of "anti-gay/anti-trans bigots" or MAGA Trump supporters. Throw in a few high profile hypocrite preachers to round that out. The vast array of really great Christian thought is omitted from the picture.
Agreed! Sue Monk Kidd’s non-fiction is incredible and never highlighted for example https://suemonkkidd.com/books/when-the-heart-waits/
As you and I probably agree, Christian writing has much to offer. There's a tricky dilemna because we desire public schools to be welcoming to all people, but in service of that we omit Christian thinking and simultaneously allow a raft of other ideas to permeate classrooms. The sanity featured in good Christian writing is omitted but students swim in a sea of other ideas and aren't educated enough in Christian thought to make intelligent comparisons.
And these same students suffer and flounder lacking ideas to inform their decisions and explain their world.
Let's do the same for the books libraries are shadow banning and censoring. Go out and buy them. I suggest reading "Unwoke" by Ted Cruz and "Letter to the American Church" by Eric Metaxas. Also "Unsettled" by Steven Koonin. There are so many more.
"To defend the library, he asked for help from the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, from which he received no reply."
I feel it is important to clarify that ALA did, in fact, provide very real assistance. A member of the Office of Intellectual Freedom met with me and the board member chairing the Collections and Services Committee and offered very useful guidance, as well as explicit support for the library's actions. ALA fell short on following through with a promised letter of support, however. We only learned that this was the result of 'internal debate' from the NY Times article.
It's also important to remember that ALA was dealing with a ten-fold increase in requests for assistance at the time, from around 200-300 annually for the last two decades, to nearly 2,000 in 2021. That trend has continued since then.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this subject. -Rich Boulet
Because every school library needs child porn.
As usual, FAIR takes a one-sided stance on divisive topics, conveniently ignoring the fact that the right has gone just as far as the left in attempts to ban, banish and censor. I had hoped that Fair would eventually emerge as a platform that transcended bias and made an attempt to promote objectivity. Instead, it has become just another one-sided conservative echo chamber.
That you for this article. Here is my 0.02USD:
As a college professor, I see many students who read few things longer than a tweet. A poll revealed that most of our students do not know where our library currently is (it moved during renovation) let alone set foot inside. They just do not use libraries in this era of 'internet in your pocket.' When I enter public libraries I see mainly senior citizens reading periodicals & using free computers as well as mothers with little children in 'play areas' (especially on rainy days). I do not see many teens or twenty-somethings who are the target audience of the books in question.
So I wonder how do the ideologies of librarians/libraries align with the ideologies of _people who actually use libraries_?