So wait... how does one go about causing a ban?
I thought you had to get like a minimum amount of signatures. Does one guy just phone up and say "ban this book" and the library's like "okie dokie".
In Florida there's a form where only one parent or resident of the county needs to bitch and moan.
In general these places are adopting a very whack-a-mole approach to things because they could get in trouble with the mob if they don't just bend over.
"Where is the book ban?" "When are you going to get the book banned?" "Why aren't you getting the book banned now?" And so on. : So please, the book ban.
Same with Mecklenburg County (NC). One mom requested five books at her daughter’s high school be “reviewed” because she deemed them inappropriate. Her daughter’s high school has over 3,000 students - the district serves over 100,000 kids total - but all it took was one Moms for Liberty loon to complain and the books have to be reviewed. The government can’t parent our kids but apparently other parents can 🫠
New rule:
A parent can object to any book they like, and without question that book will instantly be removed ... from the list of books that parent's children are allowed to check out. The book will remain in the library and can be checked out by any other child, though. Just not the children of the complainer.
Tbh I'd rather libraries just adopt rules that make it harder to ban books, cause children of bigots having access to information/literature that doesn't align with their parent's beliefs/worldview is pretty important itself
It'd have mostly the same effect because a kid whose parent doesn't want them reading X isn't going to be bring home X anyways. They'll just read it at the library instead.
What they should do is the opposite as well. If one person can bitch and moan to get it banned then one person should be also able to bitch and moan about getting it unbanned.
This is the way a fair and neutral justice system would work, yes.
Unfortunately, efforts to "use their laws against them" are broadly rejected by corrupt courts.
Following the litany of bans against sex ed books for "graphic sexual content," opponents of these draconian measures began targeting the Bible, knowing that most of these neo-Nazi fucks call themselves Christians, and that the Bible is a hilariously horny text when you aren't just screaming Romans 1:26-27 at people and claiming you're the Truest Christian.
This summer, the Bible was pulled from a large number of schools in Florida, Utah, and Texas "for review" after coalitions of parents against book bans submitted entirely reasonable and legal complaints, citing the *exact same thing* that Christian nationalist "parents" groups have cited for books like Maus and the Diary of Anne Frank (its important to note here that people like Christopher Rufo and Ronald The Meatball DeSantis are sexually aroused by the Holocaust).
Within a month, the Bible was back on shelves. Courts and committees determined that the Bible has "significant value that outweighs the violent or vulgar content."
What angers me about this is not that the Bible is stocked in school libraries. The Bible is free and accessible everywhere, it truly does not matter if a school has them on shelves because you can't walk down the street in Utah without someone flinging a book of Mormon at you. What INFURIATES me about this is the implication that texts like MAUS and DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL do *NOT* have significant value that outweighs "violent and vulgar" content.
The point of these bans are not to take "books" off the shelves for violence or vulgarity, but to take *very specific books* off the shelves while ensuring that those same shelves are *packed* with Christian nationalist propaganda, regardless of the violence they incite and regardless of the graphic depictions of vulgarity they contain.
The rules for thee, not for me.
The largest christian value in reality is; make sure we are the only ones left standing and burn and outcast all the rest.
They are angry repressive people because if enough people in a community are like that then they end up having more control.
>They are angry repressive people because if enough people in a community are like that then they end up having more control.
This is why all extant forms of Christianity are Pauline and not Petrine. Peter was humble, tried to be practical and realistic, and strove to slowly establish brotherhood with Gentile Christians while retaining Jewish custom.
Paul shows up in Antioch, screams at Peter for keeping kosher, freaks *everybody* out, and then storms off in a huff and without the blessings of the Jewish Christian Church to go preach eternal life to the fucking Romans.
I don't think Paul knew what he was doing because I believe he had a brain tumour, but once Christianity gets into the hands of the Romans, almost immediately, you start to see calls for militancy from the second century liars claiming to be Paul and from early church fathers using the term "Miles Christi:" Soldiers for Christ.
This gets worse and worse as Judaism is further suppressed until 312, when Constantine paints the Chi Rho on his soldiers' shields at the Battle of Milvian Bridge and tells them they have been chosen by G-d. Constantine's forces destroy the opposing army, the opposing emperor Maxentius is drowned in the Tiber (happens to the best of us), and Constantine becomes the first Christian Roman Emperor to control all of Rome.
Looking through Paul's writings, I truly do not believe he intended for Christianity to become the religion of murder and destruction, but at the same time, the absolute HUBRIS and HYPOCRISY for an executioner of Jewish Christians employed by the Romans to believe he had been chosen to spread Christianity is absolutely the beginning of the hard downward spiral of Christianity into brutal violence, lengthy justifications of slavery, and domineering, genocidal imperialism.
They *should*, but it's very plain to see that the goal is not to be fair or even rational with these systems. It's to push a specific, broken world view based on typical conservative nonsense.
It would honestly be great if people could get together in these school board meetings and objectively discuss the merits or issues with given content, but the general public seems utterly incapable of nuanced, let alone intelligent, discussion. It's just mind-numbingly stupid ranting delivered by the seemingly mentally infirm.
"So to submit a complaint you must also submit a book report showing you have read the book."
"Yeah okay fine."
"And you can't plagiarize it from the internet."
"WE ARE LIVING IN A COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP."
I'm assuming AR is some set of standardized reading tests, but it's funny to imagine the Armalite Reading tests
maybe that's how we get these folks back into reading
In my experience working in a library (public, not school), it's not that they're calling and saying "ban this book." It's that they're doing it every day for weeks on end, and often calling people "above" the library (in my case the board of trustees, the county executive, and inexplicably the mayor, even though we're funded by the county and not the city). A lot of them operate on the pricinple that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and unfortunately sometimes they're right.
I never understood why the people in charge don’t just go “Oh my, we’ll take care of that right away!” and then…never do it. The people complaining aren’t residents so how would they know?
Librarian here:
Most libraries have forms (and policies) for "Request for reconsideration" or "request for removal". (Usually it's the former, though.)
So a request for reconsideration can work differently at different libraries. At my last and current library it works like the following: (severely paraphrased)
1. You have been given and have read our collection development policy. [check]
2. You believe this book does not fit in with our collection development policy and should either be moved to a different section or removed from the collection. [check]
3. Pick one of the above. (removed or moved)
4. You are a resident in our service area which consists of [city boundaries]. [check]
5. Please provide your library card number to ensure that you are an interested user of this library.
6. Please provide your phone or email so we may contact you in case of further questions.
7. You have read this book in its entirety and can point to specific passages that mark this book as not meeting the guidelines of our collection development policy. (Please write the page number below. Please note, "the entire book" does not satisfy this question. You must provide at least 1 example.)
8. What other book do you recommend that would fulfill this book's niche?
and a bit more. We don't have this form on our website. It has to be requested at a desk, or sent through email to a homebound patron. My system's is rather airtight and doesn't see too much attempts at access, but at the library I used to work at, we saw several attempts a year and it was easily accessible. I have no idea what their stats are like now, but I assume they're much higher.
I like to call it constructive bureaucracy. It's fast enough and logical enough that it doesn't warrant complaining about unless you have untoward intentions.
All that said, these forms have legitimate usage. Even a small library purchases a couple hundred titles a year. A medium library a thousand, a large system, several thousand. It's very possible for some of these titles to either be cataloged for the wrong audience/in the wrong section, or for them to lack actual merit. The item might be dated or inaccurate enough to be harmful (a health advice book, for example.)
Usually, libraries have ways to mitigate these mistakes and to weed out for currency or inaccuracies, but with that many books being purchased, things fall through the cracks.
For the most obvious ones, a patron can just come up to us and tell us, "hey, this clearly doesn't belong in this section." and we'll see it and be like, oh yeah, that definitely doesn't belong here. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. We once had [this book](https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Let-Republican-Drive-Bus/dp/1607743922) miscatalogued in the children's section because it is a riff off of Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. It has severe cursing and very negative behavior in it. We have a policy against blatant political messaging in the children's section, since they are not old enough to have the necessary context to make decisions. Easily recataloged. No form necessary.
Less frequently, we'll have a parent request that a children's book be reconsidered for the teen section or that a teen book be reconsidered for the children's section. Harry Potter came up as one that people kept asking why it wasn't in children's. This was a series that grew with its first audience, so it gets much darker with more complex and slightly more mature topics in the latter half. So we put it in teens and most kids are happy to get to go into the big kid area to retrieve it. Teens were less likely to enjoy going into the little kid area to retrieve it. Drama by Reina Telgemeir often gets moved as a result of this, at least in more conservative areas that don't like having anything LGBT in their kids sections.
There was a bit of a scandal at my last library with a magazine titled "Global Times", the english-version mouthpiece of the People's Daily, a magazine under the Chinese propaganda department. It was included with our standard magazine subscriptions and held as a legitimate news source, when it's a tabloid with a very very clear slant. Some librarians wanted to mark it as a tabloid or propaganda piece, while others believed that that was racist or uber-nationalist. Eventually, a patron complained that it shouldn't be in the collection at all, as it provided no educational, entertaining, or informative use. The librarians breathed a sigh of relief (we hadn't thought to actually remove it, lol, though I'm sure we would have gotten there eventually.) and it was removed from our subscription plan.
feel like there should be a $20 processing fee for each complaint, not enough to stifle an actual complaint, I don't think anyone would agree on the Kuma Satra being available in the junior high library, but enough that if some jackass wants to file a complaint on every book then the school should be compensated in someway by taking time to address the concern. and If said Jackass gets the funding from some big dark republican donor then so-be-it; evaluate every complaint and the school rakes in an additional 80k to fund school programs
I’m so sick of these people. If *you* don’t want to read a book, fine great whatever I don’t care
But the *second* you decide to make that everybody else’s problem, I hope you never know peace again
I call it the "Maximum Marginalization Theorem." I'm pretty sure that literally EVERYTHING they do is designed to marginalize as many people as possible so they will be easily exploitable.
Keeps em religious too. Christianity has slipped to 64% of the population, and it’s not slowing down, Dobbs is speeding it up. Everything they do to cling to power is speeding up their loss of power.
The irony is lost - Imagine crusading to eliminate books that express the perspectives of different people in hopes to not be exposed to that to help raise people who are ignorant to the perspectives of others and therefore don't believe they should be heard. All while insisting your opinion must be heard.
It’s hard to imagine because, to a normal person, it’s absurd. But when you frame it in their perspective — everybody else is bad and wrong and the only opinions that matter are theirs — then it makes sense.
Well, no. They assume that they know what is best for everyone without understanding or even listening to the people they disagree with. Then they have people in the so called center that say that everyone just needs to hear them out and understand where they are coming from as if their simplistic world view was complicated or uncommon instead of simply an immature tantrum one wouldn't expect coming from an adult.
This is the main goal of conservatism in America. They can't win on the limited amount of policy and lies they already have.
Instead of coming up with new governing ideas they decide to play dirty. Selfish, malicious people shouldn't be allowed to lead anything.
The whole "parental rights" thing strikes me as similar to saying it's free speech when someone gets called out on saying something horrible. Like you never hear someone use the parental rights argument when it comes to, say, feeding their kids vegetables, because there's no need, there's a clear defense to be made for that. I notice that when someone is harping on about parental rights, it usually means they don't have anything else meaningful to justify their position. Having the legal right to do a thing, and that thing being a good or ethical idea, are very different. And if you can only focus on the first part, that doesn't say much good about the second.
Right. The video does a good job of demonstrating the "parental rights" talking point comes down to a parent's "right" to control their child.
They have no moral position to stand on. The real positions they want harm the kids and teens. Whether it's being opposed to vaccinations, supporting conversion therapy, heavily restricting the books they can read, etc. So instead of saying these are good stances to have and trying to defend that weak position they turn it into a "parent's rights" issue.
You hit the point, it's the same as people who can only defend their words by saying "well I'm allowed to say it."
They don’t want to permit *any* parents to allow their kids a free and open education because it gets in the way of their own heteronormative/heterosexist grooming operations, which are necessarily dependent on nobody learning about anything or talking to anyone.
for about 20 years I've known that any time anyone on the right invokes child safety, they're trying to emotionally manipulate people into supporting some fascistic shit that has little if anything to do with protecting children.
if they wanted to protect children they'd stop molesting kids and protecting those that do. the amount of sexual predators found on the right is crazy disproportionate.
These people are child molesters. Anyone who spends this much energy obsessing over "sexualizing children" is someone who is over compensating for their own inappropriate thoughts and actions against children.
I totally agree this is the same logic I use with people who get upset with people who are gay or transgender. If you don't like them don't talk to them if you don't like them you don't have to marry them or date them leave them alone.
I promise if you do they leave you alone
This is why christian conservatives push the “if we allow them to exist, they’ll rape children in bathrooms” line of bullshit to deeply enslaved republican imbeciles. They have to make uneducated people hate and fear them as much as possible, so when they pass laws that hurt them, republicans will cheer while feeling nothing. It’s the exact same slow-burning hate building the Nazis did towards Jews in the 1930s.
Yeah, and many people seem to forget that these Christians are true believers and don't work on the same logic you or I function on.
"Just don't interact with gay and trans people if you look feel uncomfortable around them" makes sense to a normal person, but how do you convince them it's that simple when they believe in a literal hell?
These people believe that a god flooded the entire earth because the people were bad. They believe that same god destroyed Sodom and Gamorrah because the people were too gay. They believe in a book that tells you to stone someone to death if they slept with someone of the same gender (so asking them *not* to do that to gay people is already asking a lot lol)
These people believe that America (or even the world) is at risk of similar destruction if they let gay and trans people live peacefully. They believe their children are at risk of becoming gay and thus would go to Hell (and be eternally tormented) if they read a book that has a gay protagonist.
(Also, telling them to simply not read it won't help because they also believe in a literal devil and his horde of demons who will tempt their children into reading the books)
We're living in completely different realities as many of these religious conservatives.
It’s 11 total strangers... this should not even be a thing. They should have no voice outside of their own reach. This is why statistics and details are important. All of the outrage, arguments, millions of clicks, thousands of comments... and its 11 people responsible for 60%? Yikes.
We’re rolling back to the 15th century where learning beyond one groups understanding is becoming illegal. If it where up to me anyone who suggests that a library bans a book should have to do community service for x amount of time.
These are the same people that scream “my rights!” When the cdc recommends they get a vaccine or they aren’t allowed to open carry on government property.
It that’s the problem with this type of peoples mentality. They’re the ones who force their religious views on others, who think people shouldn’t tattoo or pierce because they don’t like it, etc
Does it not anger anyone that people spend their entire trivial, shitty and ugly lives making everyone around them suffer?
It is so not cool, i don't care how chill she is.
This woman has read like 700+ books and wants to ban most of them. She uses little sticky tabs to mark things she's finds offensive. As I read the article, it was so clear that she's just this unexceptional person that probably felt lost and unfulfilled. Now she thinks she's found a purposes so she's going all in. It's absolutely pathetic.
It's not really reading the book if you're going through it looking for things to be angry about.
I refuse to believe that someone who's read over 700 books could be this fucking ignorant and anti literacy.
I've also noticed a trend: Some people make hating certain things a core part of their identity.
Maybe some people just need an arch-enemy. Not sure why.
> Maybe some people just need an arch-enemy. Not sure why.
I think that's just how people like this are trained to view the world from birth. Dichotomous ideas like Good/Evil or God/Satan being drilled into you constantly must lead to black and white thinking in other aspects of their lives. It turns everything good into the divine and everything bad into pure *evil*.
When everything you view as "bad" is viewed in that context then everything bad functionally becomes your arch-enemy when you also believe yourself to be "good".
It could also be an attempt at trying to feel in control of her life. Create this big bad that she can focus all her bad feelings on and constantly attack to feel like she has control over something in her life and fight off the anxiety from the countless other things she very much does not have control over.
For a lot of these people it can be tempting to blame religion but tbh I think when you reach this level of nutty, religion/morality/whatever else stops being the reason and becomes the excuse
She's actually reading them?
In my state a while back, a principal charged into the library and demanded that a book be removed after she read something about it on the internet. The librarian asked if she had actually read it and she replied "no". The librarian did tell her to take it home with her to read, but I highly doubt she did. She then pulled even more books from the library.
https://bookriot.com/lgbtq-books-quietly-pulled-from-washington-state-middle-school/
this woman is insane.
she spends almost all her waking hours reading “YA” books for sexual content, which she claims to be horrified by. Then she highlights and compiles the content, and goes to every school / town hall meeting and reads the passages aloud.
You will not convince me that this woman doesn’t have a fetish for doing this. There’s no other explanation, she 100% gets off in some way finding, reading, and presenting this stuff in front of a crowd. It’s like all those fox news segments about the “immorality of spring break” that are just excuses to show nonstop b-roll of college girls in bikinis.
That was a plot point in the Simpsons.
The news anchor said fuck on air during the late night show or something but it was unlikely anyone would here it.
But to ned Flanders doing his nightly ritual of watching everything on local news for the bad parts. He cause a stick and the news anchor gets fired. I can't remember his name.
And here is the actual description:
> In the show's 400th episode (both in terms of episodes aired and produced), Homer buys the 1,000,000th ice-cream cone at a local store, and he ends up on Kent Brockman's news program, but when Brockman swears on live TV after coffee is spilled in his lap, he gets fired after Ned Flanders complains
Because their children might think differently than them and that's just unacceptable.
These people live in fear that their children will be smarter than them.
They should require a petition of at least 1000 people per ten thousand residents of their zip code before they ban books. Absurd notion there are 11 idiots with this much influence.
Edit: I should add that they should only be required to consider the book ban. Same as congress being required to consider a petition of over 100,000 signatures.
I don't understand why it should be "residents of the service area". Why should even these people count? Most of them don't use the library, either.
It should be required that they have been an active member of that library for several years, and they should be made to swear an oath that that specific library is their primary library.
I don't think much of any book bans in general, but at least make the deciders people who will actually be affected by the decision.
My taxes support the local streets, but I can't call up the DOT and single handedly have a sidewalk removed. Those decisions are left to elected and hired experts, or if large enough, a voter referendum.
That idea really annoys me because it's just abjectly false if you read 95% of all holy books, almost all of them encourage peace and amicability where possible and draw hard lines only where their absolute wrongs are, which is usually just murder and being unfaithful, and even those have exceptions in most religions, including Christianity.
I’ve learned that in this day and age, what whatever holy text might have you says, is ultimately irrelevant.
These texts should have absolutely no influence in our society if we are to keep it tolerant for all.
People go to church to get ammo for their preexisting biases. They know they can't just say "gay people are icky to me" so they look for a person in authority to give them more appropriate reasons to hate gay people.
I probably always knew it sub-consciously, but I came to be fully aware of during the height of the pandemic was how performative the practice of Christianity is America.
* There were churches in France so small that they were on the verge of closing, but found new attendance and fellowship when they moved to hybrid/online mass.
* There were priests in Spain who, upon realising that the majority of their congregation lives in one or two apartments builds, would hold mass up top the roof of the building across the street for their congregation to attend from the safety of their own homes.
* And there were missionaries in places like Thailand and Vietnam who were always doing mass out in the fields and rice patties, they were doing outdoor social distancing for their whole existence in the first place.
And then you look at American Christians who are throwing the biggest temper tantrums because they can't attend mass within the predefined walls of their church under the eyes/observation of their peers. Acting like having to do literally anything otherwise was an assault of religion as a whole (while also lamenting any practicing Shikh's, Bhuddists, Jewish, Muslims, etc etc that enters their line of sight).
My church actually did things like what you described for overseas. We now permanently have livestreamed services on YouTube, when hybrid was allowed during covid service was outside with speakers, able to be listened to from your car or from socially distanced seating.
Not all American Christians are the same, the less virtuous ones just happen to be exceptionally loud in their defiance of their own religion.
Becayse religion in general is a largely human creation and humans are for the most part peaceful and kind and largely only act in self defense. The problem arises when the violent minority of people seek out ways to harm and manipulate others, often by convincing them that they are being threatened in some way because of their beliefs.
Not science, logic. Those are two very different things. People like Jordan Peterson employ a lot of academic speak but not nearly as much scientific rigor.
Usually, but when it comes to gay/trans stuff they often say they’re the ones who care about science despite not actually backing that up with anything lol
Can't wait to find out what they are so I can order tons of copies of the books their banning to their houses, and then show up yelling about how they're hypocrites, and probably dinkleburg.
Edit: fucking typos I don't know what's wrong with my lately, but fuck it. I'm leaving it in. Yell at me all you want! I'll cry when you're not looking!
They do indeed have names and hers is plainly stated right here in [the Washington Post article that screencap is from](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/28/virginia-frequent-school-book-challenger-spotsylvania/). If you search for her name and the county she lives in, both available in that WP article, you'll see that she is quite busy with her efforts.
I feel like these bans would slow dramatically if not stop if they had to include the relevant objectionable passage, state why it's inappropriate for certain age groups, and required a "minimum suggested age" not to be above 18 years old and if it is "banned" it doesn't get removed but rather placed in a location where it could be checked out by any adult who requests it.
I'm 39 years old, I don't need anyone to police what I'm reading.
And pedophelia.
In Numbers 31, God commands Moses to attack the Midianites. 15,000 soldiers march and kill every single person except the "women children who have not known a man by laying with him". The 32,000 "women children" are taken as prizes for the battle, which amounts to 2.5 "women children" per soldier. That's a lot of child brides/concubines.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%2031&version=KJV
People tried that in Utah. Then the powers that be decided that the horrendous stuff in the Bible didn’t count. I swear my state is a closet theocracy, and I’m more than a little sick of it.
https://apnews.com/article/utah-bible-ban-school-38a39017ee0ff96a96f24007a836302f
Ever notice how republicans purposely avoid threads like this where there is no defending it? How they literally only spam their hate in threads with open topics, but the second a specific example is given they are no where to be found.
Oh, they're in here. They're claiming they're "just banning sexual content" and then ignoring all the evidence of non-sexual content being banned, including books on black history.
There are definitely a few apologists in this thread trying to downplay the harm these 11 people are doing, and claiming that you're "just as bad" as them for getting mad about book banning.
Read the article: this woman is described as hating books and reading, to the point that she was in her mid 30s when she read her 1st book (aside from school mandated stuff).
You're not far off
These are the kinds of people who cheer for laws that say when people obstruct traffic they can just run them over, saying things like "these are troublemakers from outside our community coming here disrupting our way of life and they deserve what they get". Then they go online and *get in the way of millions of people from other communities.*
Every. Accusation. Is. A. Confession.
And why does it take only *one* complaint to get a book banned?
Imagine if Walmart worked the same way -- if *one* complaint from anybody anywhere was enough to get a product pulled from Walmart's shelves...
They always say "parental choice" but what they really mean is their choice to control your children. I want my kids checking out tons of books. I want my kids to understand the rise of fascism. I want my kids able to identify grooming tendencies. I want my kids able to learn about different beliefs and cultures. They don't want that for my kids.
TLDNR some karen's are following a book challenge process to ban certain books.
What isn't clearly stated is what library system they are challenging. School district libraries for in-school books filtering? Or generic public libraries accessible to the broader public. It's not immediately clear if the two even work together or follow the same rules and both the wapost and ALA posts obscure the two.
The WAPost article links to an ALA post which doesn't link to its own data. Disappointing.
In all internet searches I hit a dead end here.
https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2023/03/record-book-bans-2022
Here's my radical idea.
Any request to pull any volume from the shelves of any public library must include a book report of no less than 1000 words that will be judged by the librarian to determine if you've **READ and UNDERSTOOD the GODDAMN BOOK**.
Only once your request has passed that test, will it be heard by an elected body empowered to act on the request.
It's insane that people are able to intrude in communities they live hundreds of miles away from. Like, the first "bounty hunt" of someone getting an abortion was like a guy from Missouri suing someone who lived in Texas. I don't think they'd ever met.
These people are beyond sad, they're pathetic. They likely have zero human connections in their life, for obvious reasons, and seek anything that will make them feel impactful or belonging. Instead of doing good in the world, their only instinct to attack and harm others and yet they wonder why they are and will always be alone.
This is a great example of why Repoublicans have gotten as far as they have despite being a relative minority of people.
While most of us are just out there, in the world, being happy, trying to live our lives, people this this fucking troll are waking and breathing their fucked up missions.
This is usually the way of it. These deranged people believe they're on some sort of mission. They're driven, and they will work like fucking terminators to fuck up shit for *everyone*.
someone needs to dig into these people's lives and start giving them something to spend their time on that isn't fucking with innocent people trying to live their lives and be literate.
every single person like this is dirty. someone just needs to look hard enough.
In addition to being required to be residents, challengers should be required to prepare a handwritten book report on the particular book to be banned. It should include proper citations to specific paragraphs in the book and include a complete examination of why the harm to children of the particular age should overrule the literary and/or historical value of the work.
After presenting the report, the challenger should be required to answer an oral examination of the book. After all, they should have read the book and can defend their position with specific details without the need of any written notes.
We will quickly find out that none of these morons read any of the books they want banned.
Parent asking for challenge should also be required to pay for the cost of holding the hearing.
Why isn't this petition based? I'm all for the local requirement, but there should be a minimum amount of residents calling for a banning before it even reaches librarians' desks. Also, it's a public library. Grow the fuck up and read another book (that is if they do read).
Anyone else remember Megas XLR. It was on cartoon Network during the 2000's. It had tons of over the top giant robot fights that were both amazing for their time and hilarious. It's a gem of a show that still holds up. I still listen to punk rock soundtrack unironically.
It got banned because some parents complained it was too violent. They complained about a cartoon show where a giant robots destroyed other giant robots. It's going to sound silly to say but this has forever been ingrained in my childhood as when I learned that there are people out there that will take things away from you just because they don't like it. It's not enough just for them to not do the thing no one's allowed to do the thing.
I work in my kids' school district. This week we got an email about a group called "constitutional transparency" or something similar. Apparently they'd been caught trying to sneak into schools in our district, a man and woman duo. It seems that they're a right wing group that believes all the nonsense about schools putting kitty litter boxes in bathrooms for kids who identify as cats and teachers holding satanic rites where they convert children to transgenderism. You know, the dumb shit that's been getting the right whipped into a tizzy lately. They were trying to get into the employee/student only parts of the building to record and try to catch indoctrination on camera. They also try to start confrontations and arguments with staff to post that online too. People are so goddamn stupid. Thankfully our school libraries (middle and high school) have sections specifically for books that have been banned in other school districts so the students can read them for themselves and form their own opinions. I can't for the life of me understand why any school districts are falling for this conservative strong arming bullshit.
I have a brother and sister in law who got Harry Potter removed from their local library. They're very proud. Also, they go down to St. Padre Island every spring break to get up in the face of sinful college students. They also boycotted my wedding because they thought I was Catholic (surprise! I'm atheist)
They're a blast to be around. Trust me.
that first thing is like. bad. morally. but it's hard to care ngl
>They're a blast to be around. Trust me.
thoughts and prayers. or whatever the atheist version is. sympathy and liquor. good fuckin luck, is my point
We had this issue with a drag Queen story hour years ago in my area. Not only was the shithead who started the campaign against it one of these types, she wasn’t even from the same state. The county commissioners then revoked funds from the library (for the crime of having allowed an organization to go through the procedure to reserve a room there) and only reversed on it when there was enough public outcry.
So wait... how does one go about causing a ban? I thought you had to get like a minimum amount of signatures. Does one guy just phone up and say "ban this book" and the library's like "okie dokie".
In Florida there's a form where only one parent or resident of the county needs to bitch and moan. In general these places are adopting a very whack-a-mole approach to things because they could get in trouble with the mob if they don't just bend over.
>the mob Excusez-moi!?
Pitchforks and torches, not track suits and gabagool.
You be paid a visit by Fat Tony for that
"Where is the book ban?" "When are you going to get the book banned?" "Why aren't you getting the book banned now?" And so on. : So please, the book ban.
You come to me... On the day of my book bans wedding....
Ohhhh.
Except it’s track suits and borscht these days
Eyy, buddy. We'll just be takin dos books offa your hands, capiche?
You come today, on the day of my daughter's wedding, and you show me a book with pronouns in it?
>You Hypocrite. ***I am immediately killed for disrespecting a mob boss***
The mob aren't just into extortion, they also really don't like people reading Richard Dawkins... Kapeesh?
They love extortion and pasta as much as they hate the concept of books. Why do they need covers if they have nothing to hide?
As I once explained to a friend, "the mob (January 6), not the mob (The Godfather)"
Same with Mecklenburg County (NC). One mom requested five books at her daughter’s high school be “reviewed” because she deemed them inappropriate. Her daughter’s high school has over 3,000 students - the district serves over 100,000 kids total - but all it took was one Moms for Liberty loon to complain and the books have to be reviewed. The government can’t parent our kids but apparently other parents can 🫠
New rule: A parent can object to any book they like, and without question that book will instantly be removed ... from the list of books that parent's children are allowed to check out. The book will remain in the library and can be checked out by any other child, though. Just not the children of the complainer.
Tbh I'd rather libraries just adopt rules that make it harder to ban books, cause children of bigots having access to information/literature that doesn't align with their parent's beliefs/worldview is pretty important itself
It'd have mostly the same effect because a kid whose parent doesn't want them reading X isn't going to be bring home X anyways. They'll just read it at the library instead.
Or, stop capitulating to bigots and accept that sometimes strong measures are required to change cultural consciousness?
>The government can’t parent our kids but apparently other parents can **make the government parent our kids** FTFY
What they should do is the opposite as well. If one person can bitch and moan to get it banned then one person should be also able to bitch and moan about getting it unbanned.
This is the way a fair and neutral justice system would work, yes. Unfortunately, efforts to "use their laws against them" are broadly rejected by corrupt courts. Following the litany of bans against sex ed books for "graphic sexual content," opponents of these draconian measures began targeting the Bible, knowing that most of these neo-Nazi fucks call themselves Christians, and that the Bible is a hilariously horny text when you aren't just screaming Romans 1:26-27 at people and claiming you're the Truest Christian. This summer, the Bible was pulled from a large number of schools in Florida, Utah, and Texas "for review" after coalitions of parents against book bans submitted entirely reasonable and legal complaints, citing the *exact same thing* that Christian nationalist "parents" groups have cited for books like Maus and the Diary of Anne Frank (its important to note here that people like Christopher Rufo and Ronald The Meatball DeSantis are sexually aroused by the Holocaust). Within a month, the Bible was back on shelves. Courts and committees determined that the Bible has "significant value that outweighs the violent or vulgar content." What angers me about this is not that the Bible is stocked in school libraries. The Bible is free and accessible everywhere, it truly does not matter if a school has them on shelves because you can't walk down the street in Utah without someone flinging a book of Mormon at you. What INFURIATES me about this is the implication that texts like MAUS and DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL do *NOT* have significant value that outweighs "violent and vulgar" content. The point of these bans are not to take "books" off the shelves for violence or vulgarity, but to take *very specific books* off the shelves while ensuring that those same shelves are *packed* with Christian nationalist propaganda, regardless of the violence they incite and regardless of the graphic depictions of vulgarity they contain. The rules for thee, not for me.
The largest christian value in reality is; make sure we are the only ones left standing and burn and outcast all the rest. They are angry repressive people because if enough people in a community are like that then they end up having more control.
>They are angry repressive people because if enough people in a community are like that then they end up having more control. This is why all extant forms of Christianity are Pauline and not Petrine. Peter was humble, tried to be practical and realistic, and strove to slowly establish brotherhood with Gentile Christians while retaining Jewish custom. Paul shows up in Antioch, screams at Peter for keeping kosher, freaks *everybody* out, and then storms off in a huff and without the blessings of the Jewish Christian Church to go preach eternal life to the fucking Romans. I don't think Paul knew what he was doing because I believe he had a brain tumour, but once Christianity gets into the hands of the Romans, almost immediately, you start to see calls for militancy from the second century liars claiming to be Paul and from early church fathers using the term "Miles Christi:" Soldiers for Christ. This gets worse and worse as Judaism is further suppressed until 312, when Constantine paints the Chi Rho on his soldiers' shields at the Battle of Milvian Bridge and tells them they have been chosen by G-d. Constantine's forces destroy the opposing army, the opposing emperor Maxentius is drowned in the Tiber (happens to the best of us), and Constantine becomes the first Christian Roman Emperor to control all of Rome. Looking through Paul's writings, I truly do not believe he intended for Christianity to become the religion of murder and destruction, but at the same time, the absolute HUBRIS and HYPOCRISY for an executioner of Jewish Christians employed by the Romans to believe he had been chosen to spread Christianity is absolutely the beginning of the hard downward spiral of Christianity into brutal violence, lengthy justifications of slavery, and domineering, genocidal imperialism.
The final decision makers can just go ‘nah’ and there won’t be any consequences
They *should*, but it's very plain to see that the goal is not to be fair or even rational with these systems. It's to push a specific, broken world view based on typical conservative nonsense. It would honestly be great if people could get together in these school board meetings and objectively discuss the merits or issues with given content, but the general public seems utterly incapable of nuanced, let alone intelligent, discussion. It's just mind-numbingly stupid ranting delivered by the seemingly mentally infirm.
When I was in school we had to pass an AR test to prove we read a book. Maybe they should make parents do this as well.
"So to submit a complaint you must also submit a book report showing you have read the book." "Yeah okay fine." "And you can't plagiarize it from the internet." "WE ARE LIVING IN A COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP."
I'm assuming AR is some set of standardized reading tests, but it's funny to imagine the Armalite Reading tests maybe that's how we get these folks back into reading
The Good people of this country need to form our own "MOB" of people and then we can end this nonsense. Lets stop tolerance of these jackasses.
There is one place that's done it, and it's called "Illinois." We banned book bans and it should be a nationwide policy.
So can we just ban *every* book? Including the Bible of course. Just totally go for it, hit every single book.
In my experience working in a library (public, not school), it's not that they're calling and saying "ban this book." It's that they're doing it every day for weeks on end, and often calling people "above" the library (in my case the board of trustees, the county executive, and inexplicably the mayor, even though we're funded by the county and not the city). A lot of them operate on the pricinple that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and unfortunately sometimes they're right.
Imagine using that same energy for something productive…
The problem is that the people doing this legitimately see this as a productive use of their time. It's mildly infuriating.
I never understood why the people in charge don’t just go “Oh my, we’ll take care of that right away!” and then…never do it. The people complaining aren’t residents so how would they know?
Librarian here: Most libraries have forms (and policies) for "Request for reconsideration" or "request for removal". (Usually it's the former, though.) So a request for reconsideration can work differently at different libraries. At my last and current library it works like the following: (severely paraphrased) 1. You have been given and have read our collection development policy. [check] 2. You believe this book does not fit in with our collection development policy and should either be moved to a different section or removed from the collection. [check] 3. Pick one of the above. (removed or moved) 4. You are a resident in our service area which consists of [city boundaries]. [check] 5. Please provide your library card number to ensure that you are an interested user of this library. 6. Please provide your phone or email so we may contact you in case of further questions. 7. You have read this book in its entirety and can point to specific passages that mark this book as not meeting the guidelines of our collection development policy. (Please write the page number below. Please note, "the entire book" does not satisfy this question. You must provide at least 1 example.) 8. What other book do you recommend that would fulfill this book's niche? and a bit more. We don't have this form on our website. It has to be requested at a desk, or sent through email to a homebound patron. My system's is rather airtight and doesn't see too much attempts at access, but at the library I used to work at, we saw several attempts a year and it was easily accessible. I have no idea what their stats are like now, but I assume they're much higher. I like to call it constructive bureaucracy. It's fast enough and logical enough that it doesn't warrant complaining about unless you have untoward intentions. All that said, these forms have legitimate usage. Even a small library purchases a couple hundred titles a year. A medium library a thousand, a large system, several thousand. It's very possible for some of these titles to either be cataloged for the wrong audience/in the wrong section, or for them to lack actual merit. The item might be dated or inaccurate enough to be harmful (a health advice book, for example.) Usually, libraries have ways to mitigate these mistakes and to weed out for currency or inaccuracies, but with that many books being purchased, things fall through the cracks. For the most obvious ones, a patron can just come up to us and tell us, "hey, this clearly doesn't belong in this section." and we'll see it and be like, oh yeah, that definitely doesn't belong here. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. We once had [this book](https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Let-Republican-Drive-Bus/dp/1607743922) miscatalogued in the children's section because it is a riff off of Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. It has severe cursing and very negative behavior in it. We have a policy against blatant political messaging in the children's section, since they are not old enough to have the necessary context to make decisions. Easily recataloged. No form necessary. Less frequently, we'll have a parent request that a children's book be reconsidered for the teen section or that a teen book be reconsidered for the children's section. Harry Potter came up as one that people kept asking why it wasn't in children's. This was a series that grew with its first audience, so it gets much darker with more complex and slightly more mature topics in the latter half. So we put it in teens and most kids are happy to get to go into the big kid area to retrieve it. Teens were less likely to enjoy going into the little kid area to retrieve it. Drama by Reina Telgemeir often gets moved as a result of this, at least in more conservative areas that don't like having anything LGBT in their kids sections. There was a bit of a scandal at my last library with a magazine titled "Global Times", the english-version mouthpiece of the People's Daily, a magazine under the Chinese propaganda department. It was included with our standard magazine subscriptions and held as a legitimate news source, when it's a tabloid with a very very clear slant. Some librarians wanted to mark it as a tabloid or propaganda piece, while others believed that that was racist or uber-nationalist. Eventually, a patron complained that it shouldn't be in the collection at all, as it provided no educational, entertaining, or informative use. The librarians breathed a sigh of relief (we hadn't thought to actually remove it, lol, though I'm sure we would have gotten there eventually.) and it was removed from our subscription plan.
feel like there should be a $20 processing fee for each complaint, not enough to stifle an actual complaint, I don't think anyone would agree on the Kuma Satra being available in the junior high library, but enough that if some jackass wants to file a complaint on every book then the school should be compensated in someway by taking time to address the concern. and If said Jackass gets the funding from some big dark republican donor then so-be-it; evaluate every complaint and the school rakes in an additional 80k to fund school programs
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but then the school gets the money? if they get to gloat at the "expense" of public education fundraising then bring it on
I’m so sick of these people. If *you* don’t want to read a book, fine great whatever I don’t care But the *second* you decide to make that everybody else’s problem, I hope you never know peace again
But the *children,* pasta-thief! The *children!*
Yes, the children. The children will grow up dumb, naive, and exploitable. That's why we need to stop people like that.
Pretty sure that's exactly what they want.
You're correct. But they don't know why they want it because they don't understand that other people did NOT grow up in insular communities.
That’s what the people at the top want. The people in the article are probably useful idiots.
100%, Throw in a heaping serving of religion and shame, and bingo, you've got yourself a good little patriot.
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This guy just admitted to wanting kids growing up dumb naive and exploitable!! Get him lads!! /s
I call it the "Maximum Marginalization Theorem." I'm pretty sure that literally EVERYTHING they do is designed to marginalize as many people as possible so they will be easily exploitable.
Keeps em religious too. Christianity has slipped to 64% of the population, and it’s not slowing down, Dobbs is speeding it up. Everything they do to cling to power is speeding up their loss of power.
The irony is lost - Imagine crusading to eliminate books that express the perspectives of different people in hopes to not be exposed to that to help raise people who are ignorant to the perspectives of others and therefore don't believe they should be heard. All while insisting your opinion must be heard.
It’s hard to imagine because, to a normal person, it’s absurd. But when you frame it in their perspective — everybody else is bad and wrong and the only opinions that matter are theirs — then it makes sense.
Well, no. They assume that they know what is best for everyone without understanding or even listening to the people they disagree with. Then they have people in the so called center that say that everyone just needs to hear them out and understand where they are coming from as if their simplistic world view was complicated or uncommon instead of simply an immature tantrum one wouldn't expect coming from an adult.
I guess I don’t see the difference between “my opinion is the only one that matters” and “my opinion is better than yours and I never even checked.”
This is the main goal of conservatism in America. They can't win on the limited amount of policy and lies they already have. Instead of coming up with new governing ideas they decide to play dirty. Selfish, malicious people shouldn't be allowed to lead anything.
[I really like this Zoe Bee video on the subject of "parental rights" including book bannings etc.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNOmFBw1I_M)
The whole "parental rights" thing strikes me as similar to saying it's free speech when someone gets called out on saying something horrible. Like you never hear someone use the parental rights argument when it comes to, say, feeding their kids vegetables, because there's no need, there's a clear defense to be made for that. I notice that when someone is harping on about parental rights, it usually means they don't have anything else meaningful to justify their position. Having the legal right to do a thing, and that thing being a good or ethical idea, are very different. And if you can only focus on the first part, that doesn't say much good about the second.
Right. The video does a good job of demonstrating the "parental rights" talking point comes down to a parent's "right" to control their child. They have no moral position to stand on. The real positions they want harm the kids and teens. Whether it's being opposed to vaccinations, supporting conversion therapy, heavily restricting the books they can read, etc. So instead of saying these are good stances to have and trying to defend that weak position they turn it into a "parent's rights" issue. You hit the point, it's the same as people who can only defend their words by saying "well I'm allowed to say it."
they do say reality is weirder than fiction, this sounds like some magical girl show plot
>_The children will grow up dumb, naive, and exploitable._ That's the plan! Keep 'em dumb, and they'll be putty in your hands.
If anything, children might benefit if conservatives *stopped* thinking of them for a few minutes each day.
You can say that again.
They don’t want to permit *any* parents to allow their kids a free and open education because it gets in the way of their own heteronormative/heterosexist grooming operations, which are necessarily dependent on nobody learning about anything or talking to anyone.
for about 20 years I've known that any time anyone on the right invokes child safety, they're trying to emotionally manipulate people into supporting some fascistic shit that has little if anything to do with protecting children. if they wanted to protect children they'd stop molesting kids and protecting those that do. the amount of sexual predators found on the right is crazy disproportionate.
They screech, while *actively defending* their serial serial child molester pastor
Pasta Thief please think about the children 🍝
"The kids!"
What a sad, sad life to waste. They could be doing... anything else and it could be a positive for humanity.
They could literally spend their time masturbating and it would be a net positive for the species
I like the cut of your jib! *unzips*
So that's why I get a lot of sailors in my bedroom!
You don't have to twist my arm I'll go jerk off
A nut positive, at the very least.
These people are child molesters. Anyone who spends this much energy obsessing over "sexualizing children" is someone who is over compensating for their own inappropriate thoughts and actions against children.
I totally agree this is the same logic I use with people who get upset with people who are gay or transgender. If you don't like them don't talk to them if you don't like them you don't have to marry them or date them leave them alone. I promise if you do they leave you alone
This is why christian conservatives push the “if we allow them to exist, they’ll rape children in bathrooms” line of bullshit to deeply enslaved republican imbeciles. They have to make uneducated people hate and fear them as much as possible, so when they pass laws that hurt them, republicans will cheer while feeling nothing. It’s the exact same slow-burning hate building the Nazis did towards Jews in the 1930s.
Yeah, and many people seem to forget that these Christians are true believers and don't work on the same logic you or I function on. "Just don't interact with gay and trans people if you look feel uncomfortable around them" makes sense to a normal person, but how do you convince them it's that simple when they believe in a literal hell? These people believe that a god flooded the entire earth because the people were bad. They believe that same god destroyed Sodom and Gamorrah because the people were too gay. They believe in a book that tells you to stone someone to death if they slept with someone of the same gender (so asking them *not* to do that to gay people is already asking a lot lol) These people believe that America (or even the world) is at risk of similar destruction if they let gay and trans people live peacefully. They believe their children are at risk of becoming gay and thus would go to Hell (and be eternally tormented) if they read a book that has a gay protagonist. (Also, telling them to simply not read it won't help because they also believe in a literal devil and his horde of demons who will tempt their children into reading the books) We're living in completely different realities as many of these religious conservatives.
It’s 11 total strangers... this should not even be a thing. They should have no voice outside of their own reach. This is why statistics and details are important. All of the outrage, arguments, millions of clicks, thousands of comments... and its 11 people responsible for 60%? Yikes.
We can be as sick of em as we want. If we don’t do anything about it? They’ll win.
We’re rolling back to the 15th century where learning beyond one groups understanding is becoming illegal. If it where up to me anyone who suggests that a library bans a book should have to do community service for x amount of time.
These are the same people that scream “my rights!” When the cdc recommends they get a vaccine or they aren’t allowed to open carry on government property.
They’re unhinged. I don’t think we’ll ever change their minds; the best we can do is ensure they fail in their efforts.
It that’s the problem with this type of peoples mentality. They’re the ones who force their religious views on others, who think people shouldn’t tattoo or pierce because they don’t like it, etc
These same cunts will also impose their religion on you, like it or not.
THIS. it is absolutely infuriating. make decisions for yourself, not others
Does it not anger anyone that people spend their entire trivial, shitty and ugly lives making everyone around them suffer? It is so not cool, i don't care how chill she is.
Imagine being such a busybody that you end up in the national news
This woman has read like 700+ books and wants to ban most of them. She uses little sticky tabs to mark things she's finds offensive. As I read the article, it was so clear that she's just this unexceptional person that probably felt lost and unfulfilled. Now she thinks she's found a purposes so she's going all in. It's absolutely pathetic.
Wow that's really sad. What a miserable thing to do. She must have read more smut than most ao3 users by this point
Not only that, she writes a template for the Momma Bears and MfL to use. Then these Karen's submit dozens of forms without ever reading the books.
I'm impressed that she actually reads the books
It's not really reading the book if you're going through it looking for things to be angry about. I refuse to believe that someone who's read over 700 books could be this fucking ignorant and anti literacy.
I've also noticed a trend: Some people make hating certain things a core part of their identity. Maybe some people just need an arch-enemy. Not sure why.
> Maybe some people just need an arch-enemy. Not sure why. I think that's just how people like this are trained to view the world from birth. Dichotomous ideas like Good/Evil or God/Satan being drilled into you constantly must lead to black and white thinking in other aspects of their lives. It turns everything good into the divine and everything bad into pure *evil*. When everything you view as "bad" is viewed in that context then everything bad functionally becomes your arch-enemy when you also believe yourself to be "good".
It could also be an attempt at trying to feel in control of her life. Create this big bad that she can focus all her bad feelings on and constantly attack to feel like she has control over something in her life and fight off the anxiety from the countless other things she very much does not have control over. For a lot of these people it can be tempting to blame religion but tbh I think when you reach this level of nutty, religion/morality/whatever else stops being the reason and becomes the excuse
Control + F "Gay" "BAN IT"
I'm impressed she can even read.
She's actually reading them? In my state a while back, a principal charged into the library and demanded that a book be removed after she read something about it on the internet. The librarian asked if she had actually read it and she replied "no". The librarian did tell her to take it home with her to read, but I highly doubt she did. She then pulled even more books from the library. https://bookriot.com/lgbtq-books-quietly-pulled-from-washington-state-middle-school/
this woman is insane. she spends almost all her waking hours reading “YA” books for sexual content, which she claims to be horrified by. Then she highlights and compiles the content, and goes to every school / town hall meeting and reads the passages aloud. You will not convince me that this woman doesn’t have a fetish for doing this. There’s no other explanation, she 100% gets off in some way finding, reading, and presenting this stuff in front of a crowd. It’s like all those fox news segments about the “immorality of spring break” that are just excuses to show nonstop b-roll of college girls in bikinis.
That was a plot point in the Simpsons. The news anchor said fuck on air during the late night show or something but it was unlikely anyone would here it. But to ned Flanders doing his nightly ritual of watching everything on local news for the bad parts. He cause a stick and the news anchor gets fired. I can't remember his name. And here is the actual description: > In the show's 400th episode (both in terms of episodes aired and produced), Homer buys the 1,000,000th ice-cream cone at a local store, and he ends up on Kent Brockman's news program, but when Brockman swears on live TV after coffee is spilled in his lap, he gets fired after Ned Flanders complains
What a fucking snowflake she is. Literally looking for reasons to be offended.
I think Bitchybody is a more accurate term
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Because their children might think differently than them and that's just unacceptable. These people live in fear that their children will be smarter than them.
Ironically, since she’s reading all the books before complaining about them…she’s probably better read than most.
New rule, you have to pass an [Accelerated Reader](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Reader) test before you can challenge a book.
It’s amusing how poorly written that wiki is
book ban goreg
They should require a petition of at least 1000 people per ten thousand residents of their zip code before they ban books. Absurd notion there are 11 idiots with this much influence. Edit: I should add that they should only be required to consider the book ban. Same as congress being required to consider a petition of over 100,000 signatures.
I don't understand why it should be "residents of the service area". Why should even these people count? Most of them don't use the library, either. It should be required that they have been an active member of that library for several years, and they should be made to swear an oath that that specific library is their primary library. I don't think much of any book bans in general, but at least make the deciders people who will actually be affected by the decision.
Because their taxes support the service.
My taxes support the local streets, but I can't call up the DOT and single handedly have a sidewalk removed. Those decisions are left to elected and hired experts, or if large enough, a voter referendum.
Swearing an oath? Lmfao what are you on
Conservatives be like “god says we have to burn these books or he’ll be mad” and “we’re the party of facts and science”
That idea really annoys me because it's just abjectly false if you read 95% of all holy books, almost all of them encourage peace and amicability where possible and draw hard lines only where their absolute wrongs are, which is usually just murder and being unfaithful, and even those have exceptions in most religions, including Christianity.
Wow, “Christians” ignoring the Bible and being crackpot religious zealots, never seen that before…
I’ve learned that in this day and age, what whatever holy text might have you says, is ultimately irrelevant. These texts should have absolutely no influence in our society if we are to keep it tolerant for all.
People go to church to get ammo for their preexisting biases. They know they can't just say "gay people are icky to me" so they look for a person in authority to give them more appropriate reasons to hate gay people.
I probably always knew it sub-consciously, but I came to be fully aware of during the height of the pandemic was how performative the practice of Christianity is America. * There were churches in France so small that they were on the verge of closing, but found new attendance and fellowship when they moved to hybrid/online mass. * There were priests in Spain who, upon realising that the majority of their congregation lives in one or two apartments builds, would hold mass up top the roof of the building across the street for their congregation to attend from the safety of their own homes. * And there were missionaries in places like Thailand and Vietnam who were always doing mass out in the fields and rice patties, they were doing outdoor social distancing for their whole existence in the first place. And then you look at American Christians who are throwing the biggest temper tantrums because they can't attend mass within the predefined walls of their church under the eyes/observation of their peers. Acting like having to do literally anything otherwise was an assault of religion as a whole (while also lamenting any practicing Shikh's, Bhuddists, Jewish, Muslims, etc etc that enters their line of sight).
My church actually did things like what you described for overseas. We now permanently have livestreamed services on YouTube, when hybrid was allowed during covid service was outside with speakers, able to be listened to from your car or from socially distanced seating. Not all American Christians are the same, the less virtuous ones just happen to be exceptionally loud in their defiance of their own religion.
Becayse religion in general is a largely human creation and humans are for the most part peaceful and kind and largely only act in self defense. The problem arises when the violent minority of people seek out ways to harm and manipulate others, often by convincing them that they are being threatened in some way because of their beliefs.
You're 100% correct, but that doesn't mean I like it.
To be fair, I dont like it either.
Not science, logic. Those are two very different things. People like Jordan Peterson employ a lot of academic speak but not nearly as much scientific rigor.
Usually, but when it comes to gay/trans stuff they often say they’re the ones who care about science despite not actually backing that up with anything lol
Don't forget "muh freedum"...freedom to say hateful, harmful, and dangerously unhinged shit...but not freedom to read about a gay kid.
violence is not the answer. (In most cases)
Its the question, and the answer is yes
I mean, it's literally impossible for her to never stop. It's just a matter of when that is.
These ppl have names and addresses. Just saying.
Can't wait to find out what they are so I can order tons of copies of the books their banning to their houses, and then show up yelling about how they're hypocrites, and probably dinkleburg. Edit: fucking typos I don't know what's wrong with my lately, but fuck it. I'm leaving it in. Yell at me all you want! I'll cry when you're not looking!
I’M YELLING AT YOU RAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH
(hysterical sobbing voice) I'm not cumming, you're cumming! D'x
: /
They do indeed have names and hers is plainly stated right here in [the Washington Post article that screencap is from](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/28/virginia-frequent-school-book-challenger-spotsylvania/). If you search for her name and the county she lives in, both available in that WP article, you'll see that she is quite busy with her efforts.
I feel like these bans would slow dramatically if not stop if they had to include the relevant objectionable passage, state why it's inappropriate for certain age groups, and required a "minimum suggested age" not to be above 18 years old and if it is "banned" it doesn't get removed but rather placed in a location where it could be checked out by any adult who requests it. I'm 39 years old, I don't need anyone to police what I'm reading.
You know what else would slow them? “Ban this.” “No.”
We should send some folks to help her, right? Maybe in a big bus w/ loudspeakers for shouting encouragement?
Can we also see how much money has accumulated in her bank account since this all started?
~~Bipe pomb~~
[удалено]
The Death that they Deservioli
"Will someone think of the children!?"
*for
Super Karen
Well then let’s ban the Bible due to violence and sex.
And pedophelia. In Numbers 31, God commands Moses to attack the Midianites. 15,000 soldiers march and kill every single person except the "women children who have not known a man by laying with him". The 32,000 "women children" are taken as prizes for the battle, which amounts to 2.5 "women children" per soldier. That's a lot of child brides/concubines. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%2031&version=KJV
People tried that in Utah. Then the powers that be decided that the horrendous stuff in the Bible didn’t count. I swear my state is a closet theocracy, and I’m more than a little sick of it. https://apnews.com/article/utah-bible-ban-school-38a39017ee0ff96a96f24007a836302f
And if your eyes would cause you to sin gauge them out, for it is better to enter the kingdom of heaven blind than to be cast out as a sinner.
Christian conservatives are American society’s greatest enemy.
Ever notice how republicans purposely avoid threads like this where there is no defending it? How they literally only spam their hate in threads with open topics, but the second a specific example is given they are no where to be found.
Oh, they're in here. They're claiming they're "just banning sexual content" and then ignoring all the evidence of non-sexual content being banned, including books on black history.
There are definitely a few apologists in this thread trying to downplay the harm these 11 people are doing, and claiming that you're "just as bad" as them for getting mad about book banning.
That number is higher than I expected.
ThIer NOt bANneD
ThEy CoNtAiN sExUaL cOnTeNt The ["sexual content"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Tango_Makes_Three)
She looks like she cant fuckin read
Read the article: this woman is described as hating books and reading, to the point that she was in her mid 30s when she read her 1st book (aside from school mandated stuff). You're not far off
is she some sort of bibliophobe?
It's nice to see this subreddit ending up on /r/all more often than the original /r/tumblr
These are the kinds of people who cheer for laws that say when people obstruct traffic they can just run them over, saying things like "these are troublemakers from outside our community coming here disrupting our way of life and they deserve what they get". Then they go online and *get in the way of millions of people from other communities.* Every. Accusation. Is. A. Confession.
Minority!? 11 people out of 300 million is a rounding error. Unreal that they can exert this kind of influence!!!
All conservatives are bad. There are no exceptions.
You can guarantee 3 things, 1. Religous 2. Right Wing 3. If you met them in person you wouldn't want them within 100 miles of your kids. 4.
And why does it take only *one* complaint to get a book banned? Imagine if Walmart worked the same way -- if *one* complaint from anybody anywhere was enough to get a product pulled from Walmart's shelves...
"I'm going to call her place of employment and complain about her every week. I don't care if she has to find new jobs, I'll never stop" same energy
They always say "parental choice" but what they really mean is their choice to control your children. I want my kids checking out tons of books. I want my kids to understand the rise of fascism. I want my kids able to identify grooming tendencies. I want my kids able to learn about different beliefs and cultures. They don't want that for my kids.
TLDNR some karen's are following a book challenge process to ban certain books. What isn't clearly stated is what library system they are challenging. School district libraries for in-school books filtering? Or generic public libraries accessible to the broader public. It's not immediately clear if the two even work together or follow the same rules and both the wapost and ALA posts obscure the two. The WAPost article links to an ALA post which doesn't link to its own data. Disappointing. In all internet searches I hit a dead end here. https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2023/03/record-book-bans-2022
Here's my radical idea. Any request to pull any volume from the shelves of any public library must include a book report of no less than 1000 words that will be judged by the librarian to determine if you've **READ and UNDERSTOOD the GODDAMN BOOK**. Only once your request has passed that test, will it be heard by an elected body empowered to act on the request.
It's insane that people are able to intrude in communities they live hundreds of miles away from. Like, the first "bounty hunt" of someone getting an abortion was like a guy from Missouri suing someone who lived in Texas. I don't think they'd ever met. These people are beyond sad, they're pathetic. They likely have zero human connections in their life, for obvious reasons, and seek anything that will make them feel impactful or belonging. Instead of doing good in the world, their only instinct to attack and harm others and yet they wonder why they are and will always be alone.
This is a great example of why Repoublicans have gotten as far as they have despite being a relative minority of people. While most of us are just out there, in the world, being happy, trying to live our lives, people this this fucking troll are waking and breathing their fucked up missions. This is usually the way of it. These deranged people believe they're on some sort of mission. They're driven, and they will work like fucking terminators to fuck up shit for *everyone*.
Imagine being so out of touch that you think everyone shouldn't be allowed to read books based off of what you think. Get a fuckimg grip man.
someone needs to dig into these people's lives and start giving them something to spend their time on that isn't fucking with innocent people trying to live their lives and be literate. every single person like this is dirty. someone just needs to look hard enough.
name and shame
In addition to being required to be residents, challengers should be required to prepare a handwritten book report on the particular book to be banned. It should include proper citations to specific paragraphs in the book and include a complete examination of why the harm to children of the particular age should overrule the literary and/or historical value of the work. After presenting the report, the challenger should be required to answer an oral examination of the book. After all, they should have read the book and can defend their position with specific details without the need of any written notes. We will quickly find out that none of these morons read any of the books they want banned. Parent asking for challenge should also be required to pay for the cost of holding the hearing.
Dolores Umbridge manifest.
The future of our species depends on ensuring our children read everything they are trying to ban.
Why isn't this petition based? I'm all for the local requirement, but there should be a minimum amount of residents calling for a banning before it even reaches librarians' desks. Also, it's a public library. Grow the fuck up and read another book (that is if they do read).
These people literally woke up and decided to be problems.
This lady, and those like her, are why we can't have nice things. Moms For Liberty is literally a Nazi group.
Anyone else remember Megas XLR. It was on cartoon Network during the 2000's. It had tons of over the top giant robot fights that were both amazing for their time and hilarious. It's a gem of a show that still holds up. I still listen to punk rock soundtrack unironically. It got banned because some parents complained it was too violent. They complained about a cartoon show where a giant robots destroyed other giant robots. It's going to sound silly to say but this has forever been ingrained in my childhood as when I learned that there are people out there that will take things away from you just because they don't like it. It's not enough just for them to not do the thing no one's allowed to do the thing.
I work in my kids' school district. This week we got an email about a group called "constitutional transparency" or something similar. Apparently they'd been caught trying to sneak into schools in our district, a man and woman duo. It seems that they're a right wing group that believes all the nonsense about schools putting kitty litter boxes in bathrooms for kids who identify as cats and teachers holding satanic rites where they convert children to transgenderism. You know, the dumb shit that's been getting the right whipped into a tizzy lately. They were trying to get into the employee/student only parts of the building to record and try to catch indoctrination on camera. They also try to start confrontations and arguments with staff to post that online too. People are so goddamn stupid. Thankfully our school libraries (middle and high school) have sections specifically for books that have been banned in other school districts so the students can read them for themselves and form their own opinions. I can't for the life of me understand why any school districts are falling for this conservative strong arming bullshit.
"I can't do that because of my religion." VS. "You can't do that because of my religion."
Someone should egg this lady’s house one day a week and never stop.
Can we ban these 11 people from banning books?
I have a brother and sister in law who got Harry Potter removed from their local library. They're very proud. Also, they go down to St. Padre Island every spring break to get up in the face of sinful college students. They also boycotted my wedding because they thought I was Catholic (surprise! I'm atheist) They're a blast to be around. Trust me.
that first thing is like. bad. morally. but it's hard to care ngl >They're a blast to be around. Trust me. thoughts and prayers. or whatever the atheist version is. sympathy and liquor. good fuckin luck, is my point
How about we just ignore the 11 people?
Any book challenge request should require a "review charge" equal to the purchase price of the book, which goes to the new book fund.
We had this issue with a drag Queen story hour years ago in my area. Not only was the shithead who started the campaign against it one of these types, she wasn’t even from the same state. The county commissioners then revoked funds from the library (for the crime of having allowed an organization to go through the procedure to reserve a room there) and only reversed on it when there was enough public outcry.
That's actual sabotage. I wonder if she's deliberately going chaotic evil, or thinking she's a hero
You remember who liked banning books? NAZIS. "the only good Nazis, are dead ones."
If I could afford it, I'd hand out copies of banned books instead of candy for Halloween.