Support Local Libraries; Because Librarians Perform Many Important...um, "Services"

'Cuz Reading is sexy as Hell

CUSTOMER: I don’t know why she wants it, but my wife asked for a copy of The Dinosaur Cookbook.

BOOKSELLER: The Dinah Shore Cookbook?

• Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has limits.

• Albert Einstein

Republicans in Arkansas have been so terrified about librarians lending kids books that might “turn” them gay or transgender that they passed a law to prevent such harmful behavior. Why shouldn’t we be able to keep all them Librul liberryans in check, they thought, and keep them from poisoning the minds of our precious snowflakes?

So they passed a law to keep them damned Librul liberryans from passing “harmful material” on the sly to Arkansas’ young ‘uns, thereby protecting them from spontaneously gayness or demanding gender-affirming care.

Hey, someone had to do it…right??

Yeah, ‘cuz you know how devious and underhanded those liberryans can be when it comes to recruiting kids, right??

That’s precisely why Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Republicans in the Arkansas legislature put the screws to liberryans. Well, except that a judge didn’t quite see things the same way.

A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction last week against an Arkansas law that established criminal charges for librarians and booksellers who lend or sell so-called “harmful” material to minors — largely books they think will turn kids gay or trans — on the grounds that it is a pretty obvious violation of the First Amendment. It’s one thing for asshole parents to tell their kids what they can and cannot read, but what business do they have denying books to kids whose parents don’t want them to grow up to be illiterate bigots?

The measure, signed into law by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, also made it easier for “concerned parents” to demand that books they take issue with be put in an area that would be off-limits to children. You know, like when video stores back in the day had backrooms filled with porn, except these proposed spaces would be enormous, because we’re not just talking about porn here, but any book that some parents feel like kids shouldn’t read, which is probably literally everything but The Baby-Sitters Club. Wait — maybe not even that. After all, Kristy was pretty butch.

Not that most adults in Arkansas read a whole helluva lot, but they do know porn when they hear about (or see) it, even if they don’t quite understand what it is. Since when has a lack of first-hand knowledge EVER stopped a good, God-fearin’, White Conservative Christian heterosexual from working up a perfectly good righteous outrage?

You gotta stop evil before it gets a foothold, knowhutimean?

Not that they shouldn’t be free to do that anyway. I read that book in 10th grade and look how I turned out! Flawed, but at least not a weirdo who goes around banning books. Or putting eyeballs where eyeballs shouldn’t go, because shockingly enough it is entirely possible to read a book and then not go out and do the thing you just read about in the book. Except for awkwardly trying to start a Baby-Sitters Club. Or trying to find raspberry cordial to get drunk off of (not an easy task — I’ve still never managed to locate any), or asking their Nana to make them blancmange, because who didn’t try to do that shit?

Well, sure…I read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in fourth grade, but I didn’t immediately go out and murder an entire family and then launch myself on a homicidal rampage. I remember being disturbed by what I read, but Capote’s tome wasn’t exactly light bedtime reading.

Then I followed it by reading William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. I remember being so thoroughly grossed out by the description of projectile vomiting that I couldn’t eat breakfast one morning. Yeah, for some reason, I was reading it before I sat down in front of a bowl of Corn Flakes…and it’s the only time in my life I’ve been too grossed out to eat first thing in the morning.

I’ll own it; I was a pretty fucked-up kid. I DID like librarians, though.

But I didn’t need a law telling me what librarians could or couldn’t recommend to me. I found those books (and others way beyond my age group) on my own.

As might be imagined, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said that he’d be “reviewing the judge’s opinion and will continue to vigorously defend the law.”

Of course, despite the law’s obvious unconstitutionality, Republicans can’t afford to admit they may have overstepped legally…so they’ll keep up the rhetoric until they figure everyone’s forgotten the whole mess. Then they’ll shout, “SQUIRREL!!” and move on to oppressing another group for equally stupid and silly reasons.

They’re Republicans; if they’re weren’t trying to pointless oppress a minority class of people, they’d have no reason to live.

If Tim Griffin had his way, this is where Arkansas’ liberryans would be…and they’d probably be about as sexy as the late Burgess Meredith.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The reality, of course, is that school librarians (and those in public libraries) do yeoman’s work helping students find books and reading materials that match their interests or help them complete school assignments. It’s highly unlikely that they’re handing out porn of any flavor, much less trying to “recruit” students to the gay or transgender “lifestyle,” whatever that might mean.

Ultimately, it’s just another invented skirmish in the culture wars that Republicans use to create fear and loathing of those NOT LIKE US.

The good news is that, at least for the time being, people who enjoy books and spending time in libraries can relax. That is, until the next time Republicans come up with another dumbass scheme to persecute and prosecute liberryans for some imagined heinous crime against the baby Jesus. Or something like that.

That is, until one of them gets busted for having had sex with an underage boy AND girl for the past several years. And people realize it’s the White Conservative Christian heterosexuals we need to be concerned with, NOT the librarians.

The executive director of Central Arkansas Library System, Nate Coulter, said the judge’s 49-page decision recognized the law as censorship, a violation of the Constitution and wrongly maligning librarians.

“As folks in southwest Arkansas say, this order is stout as horseradish!” he said in an email.

“I’m relieved that for now the dark cloud that was hanging over CALS’ librarians has lifted,” he added.

Cheryl Davis, general counsel for the Authors Guild, said the organization is “thrilled” about the decision. She said enforcing this law “is likely to limit the free speech rights of older minors, who are capable of reading and processing more complex reading materials than young children can.”

The “dark cloud that was hanging over CALS’ librarians has lifted?” Yeah, I suppose that would be the case when you have Right-wing nutcases deciding what books they have a “problem” with? The problem with the law, at least insofar as I understand it, is that there’s no specific test for “objectionability.” It’s purely and maddeningly subjective, so one person’s porn is another’s Winnie the Pooh.

And if one person has a problem with a book, then EVERYONE has a problem. So one person with a hatred of libraries and learning could quickly deplete a library out of prejudice, hatred, and bigoty.

I was perfectly fine reading In Cold Blood when I was in fourth grade. Someone else’s parents may not have been nearly so sanguine about that, but mine were probably happy they knew where I was and that the school bullies hadn’t deposited me upside down in a snow drift minus my pants and underwear.

At least my parents knew enough to leave me alone and let me read what I wanted to…because I would’ve found a way to do it, anyway. I wasn’t afraid of books, nor was I afraid of learning. Living in a town of 941 frozen souls in the north woods of Minnesota, reading (and basketball) was about the only real entertainment I had, and so I read a lot of books I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to peruse today. And somehow I survived the trauma.

There are some red states- Mississippi, f’rinstance- that are doing everything short of burning down their libraries…because they’re just porn dispensaries, anyway.

The state of Mississippi has come up with a nifty way to keep minors safe from ever encountering some of the many things that rightwing Republican pecksniffs might consider offensive. The state's new library censorship law, Senate Bill 2346, went into effect on July 1, and it bans libraries from allowing minors to have access to any materials that include sex, nudity, or the Very Existence Of LGBTQ+ people. As a result, the law's practical effect has been to prohibit everyone under the age of 18 from accessing digital materials like ebooks and audiobooks from school and even public libraries, statewide, unless they have written permission from a parent or guardian — and in many cases, not even then.

Why? Because, son, if the State of Mississippi wanted you to think critically, IT WOULD’VE ISSUED YOU A BRAIN, that’s why!!

‘Cuz learning’s for losers and Libruls….

Whenever some libertarian idiot comes up with a nifty plan to do away with public libraries because can't people just use Amazon, it always evokes stories from people who, as kids, found solace in libraries, where nobody was yelling at them or telling them they were garbage, where they found books that depicted other people like them and gave them some inkling that they weren't alone and that reading was a way to connect with other people across time and space.

Yeah, can see why Mississippi would want to stamp that out.

Here's a link everyone aged 13 to 21 in Mississippi should have: Brooklyn Library's Books Unbanned initiative, which lets young people anywhere in US America get an unrestricted e-library card so they can read freely. It's not quite a warm place to sit and read on a rainy day, but it's got the book part taken care of.

One of the best things about growing up in Walker, MN (pop. 941), was that it had an amazingly well-stocked public library for a town of its size. I don’t know if that’s still the case today, but I lived there until we moved to St. Cloud, MN, just before my sophomore year of high school. I left my buttprint forever embedded in my favorite chair in the Walker Public Library.

I can remember spending many an hour exploring that library. It’s what helped feed my interest in the world outside the frozen tundra that was home. It’s also what helped get me through the gawdawful winters, when then snow was up to my hips, everything was frozen, and the temperatures stuck well below zero for days and weeks on end.

Yeah, libraries make a difference. And librarians aren't the enemy…unless you can’t stand the idea of children learning and dreaming and wanting more from life than being an angry, reactionary White Conservative Christian heterosexual. If that’s the case, you shouldn’t be breeding. You should probably leave that to those who actually give a damn and want to see children develop to their full potential.

Otherwise, why not join a militia and storm through the woods and pretend you’re part of Meal Team Six? That will probably be your sad, sorry life’s biggest accomplishment, anyway.

Leave libraries and librarians alone for the rest of us to enjoy, whydon’tcha??