Palin's Book-banning Efforts, Redux (Unbelievable)

PALIN'S BOOK-BANNING EFFORTS, REDUX.... Here's what we know about Sarah Palin's interest in banning books. Time reported last week that Palin asked the Wasilla librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, about the process for banning library books. Baker was reportedly "aghast" at the question. Soon after taking office, Palin, according to a New York Times report, fired Baker, and news reports from the time indicate that Palin thought Baker hadn't done enough to give her "full support" to the mayor.

Palin reversed course on Baker's dismissal after a local outcry, and later said the discussions about banning books were "rhetorical."

Yesterday, ABC News' Brian Ross moved the ball forward a bit, with an interesting report.

Ross emphasized an angle I previously hadn't heard much about. Palin was elected mayor thanks in large part to the strong backing of her church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, which, right around the time Palin took office, "began to focus on certain books available in local stores and in the town library, including one called 'Go Ask Alice,' and another one written by a local pastor, Howard Bess, called 'Pastor, I am Gay.'"

Palin became mayor, her church was interested in censorship, and soon after, Palin asked a "rhetorical" question about how books might be excluded from the public library. When the librarian resisted, she was, at least initially, fired.

The line from the McCain campaign has been that Palin never had any interest whatsoever in banning library books. That seems increasingly difficult to believe.

Thanks!

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This "book banning" stuff is familiar to me from when my Dad was smeared in the NYT with it.

The charge of "book banning" is used two ways by the "social justice" pilgrims. Against my Dad it was used to slander, to propagandize, to associate someone whose duty it was to decide which books are used in a curriculum, and available in school libraries with the Nazis of WWII. Because the Nazis burned books. The Nazis banned books -- books were forbidden to be owned. There are famous photos and newsreels of Nazis burning books.

Stalin also banned books and did it far more effectively -- people got killed for having certain books, not just had their books confiscated. The "social justice" pilgrims rarely mention that.

Used in this way, the "book burner" slam is just a smear -- a potent one, but still -- just a smear.

The second way the "book burning" charge is used is far more dangerous. Please take my warning on it, and stop it out.

What is that way? To force communities to fill their children's library shelves with the amoral and immoral children's book, so that the children grow up rudderless and open to all manner of immoral behavior and thus made prey to the marxists, the homosexuality lobby, the self-haters and the extreme libertarian secularists.

There are 172,000 new book titles published in the US each year. Yet which books will get the press when your town library doesn't buy them? Which ones will result in charges of "book banning"? The very ones most likely to put children at moral hazard, when the material is read by those not yet mature enough and founded enough in moral judgment to be able to read the amoral or immoral material without being harmed by it.

Take "Catcher in the Rye", for example. Unless the reader has read up to the level of Dostoevsky, or Faulkner, and has read of the long-term devastation of indulgent amoral dream-like casual sex or the amorally indulgence in similar human drives, few young intelligent teenagers will not come to consider casual sex as "that's okay too".

Catcher in the Rye is a great novel but it is both unbalanced in moral viewpoint and yet highly emotionally evocative, a very likeable and sympathetic hero, thus the novel is poison to the intelligent youngster who is not adequately established in moral bearing to be able to predict the real-life long-term consequences of what the book does not lay out.

This same is true of Nabokov's Lolita, and a good number of novels in the past fifty years.

Certainly a reader can chase after such a book on his or her own, and come to acquire a read of it, but that chase itself acts as a warning to the reader.

Yet to have such books taught to a class too young, too immature or too inexperienced in processing morally difficult literary context give the poison much more potency. It then carries the good name and moral weight of Education and becoming an adult in official community context. It makes casual sex, or whatever social vice or sloth the novel indulges, into the community standard.

Fear of being labeled a "book burner" has prevented many a responsible adult in charge of library or curriculum from enforcing reasonable community standards of morality. The results are well noted, and not good. Why are doctors pushing the HPV vaccine? Why are nearly 50% of babies born out of wedlock, why are so most families in poor districts broken?

The "rich" oppress the poor: when the responsible act not.

Wow! You have got to be kidding me - And you think your parents did a jam-up job with you!!! I almost can’t believe what came from your heart!!!

If you get a chance, you really should read the story of The Prodigal Son. No moral relativism to be found there, and no argument can be made against the wisdom of the words of Christ, nor the application of its meaning to us all.

I’m sure you know this, but just in case, the parable is given to us as children of the living God to demonstrate that no matter what we do, we have his forgiveness if we repent.

On another level, the parable gives insight to us as parents who struggle to raise our children right when there is another world that is pulling at them. Our children have a God-given will of their own, and when they make mistakes/sin against God, they will suffer the consequences that come from those failings that are attributed to human nature. But, as parents, we’re there for them with open arms, forgiveness, and restoration that comes from repentance - and so is their Savior.

We make bad decisions in our Christian walk, but we’re met with forgiveness every time we acknowledge our sin.

Apparently, you are under the delusion that if children are properly instructed in HOW THEY SHOULD ACT, that none of them will get pregnant / cause a pregnacy. Either you do not understand how babies are made, or you have no clue as to how clueless teenagers can be.

As the father of four, and the grandfather of eight, I guaran-d*mn-tee that good parents have children who make serious and foolish mistakes, and even bad parents are sometimes blessed with children who do everything right and progress well in life without serious mistakes. If your experience is different from that, count yourself very lucky, and stop lecturing others about a real world you don't live in.

Congressman Billybob

Tenth in the ten-part series, "The Owner's Manual (Part 10) -- The Remaining Amendments"

Latest article, "The Straight-Shooting Governor"

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