Free Republic

‘Whiteness … has permeated every aspect of librarianship’ Many people see libraries as citadels of knowledge and learning, but some scholars and academics are claiming that there is too much “whiteness” in them. “Libraries in this country have always been white,” Louisiana State University School of Library and Information Science Professor Suzanne Stauffer told The College Fix in an email. “Public and school libraries in particular have been a means of assimilation into white American middle-class culture. Founders of public libraries were quite explicit about this.” One of the most popular efforts to remedy this perceived fault is the University...

A Missouri lawmaker said he has never experienced so much”vitriol” and “hate” as he has faced after introducing a bill against drag queens reading to children in public libraries. Republican Missouri state Rep. Ben Baker’s bill, which seeks to ban Drag Queen Story Hour in public libraries, has been met with opposition from local librarians, the American Library Association, Drag Queen Story Hour defenders and LGBTQ proponents.

The Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act, sponsored by state Sen. Paul Bailey and state Rep. Andy Holt, would establish a five-member review board for each public library to determine “whether any sexual material provided to the public by the public library is age-inappropriate sexual material.” Voters would elect the members. The board would hold public hearings, during which time “members of the community may present concerns to the board,” according to the bill’s text. The bill is HB 2721 in the House and SB2896 in the Senate. Holt said it would provide local control on controversial issues. “There haven’t...

A council in Newham, a borough of London, England, has announced its plans to host a series of Drag Queen Story Times for preschoolers in the community. According to Infowars, however, Newham has a bustling population of Muslims, who vehemently and vocally oppose all expressions of homosexuality and gender confusion. This should go over well. “The first of our Drag Queen Story Times for under 5s & their parents & carers at @NewhamLibraries this #LGBTHM20 is on Friday,” Newham Council said in a tweet earlier this week. “Come & listen to fabulous stories, beautifully told.”

A Missouri Lawmaker says he wants to keep sexual materials at libraries out of kid’s hands. But a lot of people are pushing against the idea, saying it’s a form of censorship. “The main thing is I want to be able to take my kids to a library and make sure they’re in a safe environment, and that they’re not gonna be exposed to something that is objectionable material,” says State Representative Ben Baker. “Unfortunately, there are some libraries in the state of Missouri that have done this. And that’s a problem.” On January 8th, Baker filed the Parental Oversight...

Rep. Eric Swalwell’s surplus shoelaces have now tied up a place in history. At the end of the Dublin Democrat’s short-lived presidential campaign, Swalwell was left with $7,000 worth of branded shoelaces. The excess swag was transferred to his congressional campaign, as detailed in a campaign finance report filed at the end of the fundraising quarter. Now, two sets of those shoelaces will be preserved for future generations at the California State Library.

When people in a community find out that their local public library is hosting a “Drag Queen Story Hour” – bizarre men in garish women’s clothes reading LGBT-themed books to young children ages 3-8 – their first reaction is usually shock and disgust. They wonder, “How is this happening?”

A video of a "Drag Queen Story Hour" in Washington state has gone viral on social media. The video is of a drag queen stripper, and although it reportedly occurred over the summer at the King County Public Library in Renton, it was only recently posted to Twitter. One Blogger reported the June 2019 event was advertised as being for "teens and tweens." To date, the video has received nearly 2 million views and many people who posted comments about it asked, "What does this have to do with reading?" Some pro-family groups and "Activist Mommy" Elizabeth Johnston have criticized...

Trans and LGBTQIAP activists will tell you that you have no right to question their ideology or actions. They are the keepers of the new and unassailable religion. Their religion is called Queer Theory and it’s adherents are radical misogynistic zealots that have created their own queer caliphate. Their god is perversity, transgender “women” are their high priestesses, and drag queens are their temple dancers. At their unholy altar of misogyny they sacrifice the dignity of women and sexualize children in their pedophilic fantasies. American women need to wake up and realize that Queer-Marxists are doing everything they can to...

Our public libraries have been taken over by liberal ideologues and nowhere has this been more evident than at the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference held last month in Washington DC. The world’s largest library conference, attended by 21,460 people, featured over 100 workshops with the theme “equity, diversity, and inclusion.” As you would expect, these workshops included topics such as Drag Queen Storytimes, LGBT issues, non-traditional families, minors’ “rights” to privacy, and gender confusion. According to The Federalist, “Politically charged talks and workshops like these formed at least one-third of the conference offerings.” Of all the different themes...

Workers in Johnson County could have hundreds of additional dollars taken out of their paychecks annually to help pay for roadwork in the county and an expansion of the county jail — work expected to cost more than $130 million in the next five years. The Johnson County Council unveiled an income tax increase proposal to fund $110 million in road, bridges and infrastructure improvements across the county, mainly due to the construction of Interstate 69, and an estimated $20 million jail expansion project that would address a frequently overcrowded jail that the state has ordered the county to fix....

My first reaction to this tweet was: Surely, the article it links to can’t be this bad? It’s a parody right? "Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries." (Link to read the tweet) Alas, no. If anything, the tweet actually understates the degree of nihilist unthought that passes for wokeness among some academic librarians. The Library Journal tweet links to a blog post by Sofia Leung, whose Twitter profile describes her as an “academic librarian. I like cats, whiskey, intersectional feminism, social...

Sorry, there is no main body associated with this thread, just links that don't work when I post them here. But... the original U. of Wisc. source url above ( http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/GenderStudies/GenderStudies-idx?scope=GenderStudies.DovieHorvitz&type=browse ) does have links that seem to work. Besides, they have a rather ominous copyright warning at the end that I wouldn't want FR or me to run afoul [of]!

Officials at Cambridge Public Schools are distancing the district from a letter penned by a school librarian rejecting books donated by first lady Melania Trump. In the blog post, published Tuesday on the Horn Book, Liz Phipps Soeiro, a library media specialist at the district’s Cambridgeport School, began by thanking the first lady for the 10 Dr. Seuss books sent to her school “for its high standards of excellence.” But she went on to explain why they would not be keeping the gifted titles. “Cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit are suffering through expansion, privatization, and school ‘choice’ with no...

A Cambridge Public Schools librarian has explained why her class won't be keeping a donation of books donated by First Lady Melania Trump. In an open letter on the book review site, Horn Book, elementary school librarian Liz Phipps Soeiro explained that her school already has thousands of books and postured that there were schools in greater need of the donation. She also took the opportunity to criticize the policies of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Soeiro criticized the choice of donated books as well. "So, my school doesn’t have a NEED for these books. And then there’s the matter...

Don't look now, but your local school library soon could be getting into the liberal indoctrination racket. School librarians have taken it upon themselves to teach students how to identify fake news. They say they do this by helping them understand the CRAAP that comes their way. CRAAP, which stands for Currency (timeliness), Relevance (importance), Authority (source), Accuracy (reliability) and Purpose (reason), "helps students sort through the overwhelming flood of digital information," according to a recent story in USA TODAY. "These are the questions we have to introduce these ideas to kids before they think they know everything," Shannon Walters,...

April Hathcock, an attorney and NYU librarian, argues that "whiteness... has permeated every aspect of librarianship" and must be "dismantled." Her article, titled "White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS," offers ways to "correct for whiteness" in the field of librarians. "It is no secret that librarianship has traditionally been and continues to be a profession dominated by whiteness," Ms. Hathcock begins her piece. "In this article, I use “whiteness” to refer not only to the socio-cultural differential of power and privilege that results from categories of race and ethnicity;" she writes. "It also stands as a marker for...

A book of short stories titled “Forty Minutes Late” has been returned to a San Francisco library -- 100 years late. ... Johnson’s great grandmother had checked it out from the city’s old Fillmore branch in 1917. She passed away a week before the due date, and the Fillmore branch is no longer around. Johnson found the 1909 book, by F. Hopkinson Smith, in an old steamer trunk in 1996. He assumed the library wouldn’t want it back, but a recently announced “fine forgiveness program” that runs through Feb. 14 inspired him to return it.

Parents of fourth-graders at an Oregon elementary school were 'furious' to discover that their children - some as young as nine - had read an explicit sex education book featuring cartoons of sex acts and masturbation, Fox 12 Oregon reported Thursday. In a letter to parents, Hudson Park Elementary School admitted that copies of 'It's Perfectly Normal,' a guide to sexual health aimed at children ten and up, were passed around to students. . . . The book is aimed at children aged 10 and up, and features cartoon depictions of male and female teens and adults. Acts featured in...

NEW YORK (AP) — On the latest list of books most objected to at public schools and libraries, one title has been targeted nationwide, at times for the sex and violence it contains, but mostly for the legal issues it raises. The Bible. “You have people who feel that if a school library buys a copy of the Bible, it’s a violation of church and state,” says James LaRue, who directs the Office for Intellectual Freedom for the American Library Association, which released its annual 10 top snapshot of “challenged” books on Monday, part of the association’s “State of Libraries...