A recent Time Magazine article claims that, as Mayor, Sarah Palin looked into removing books with ‘inappropriate language’ from library shelves. The paragraph in question:
Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.
Steve Benen, over at The Washington Monthly claims that the librarian was actually fired, then brought back due to public outcry, but he doesn’t cite a source other than the Time article, so I’m suspending judgment on that. If it were true, though, it would be something of an eerie mirror of Palin’s Troopergate situation, and even Time’s report, of a threatened firing, is awfully troubling.
And then there’s the book banning itself. In a just world, a sane world, a decent world, any attempt to ban a book would be met with disgust from all quarters. Personally, I’ve got no patience for censorship, period. Whether it’s the left or the right that’s doing it, it’s wrong, and I’ve said so often in the past.
In this case, though, I guess we’d better gear up to hear plenty of defenses of book banning, and why telling us what we’re allowed to read is somehow reasonable and appropriate.
Oh how I love the party of small government.
UPDATE: Steve Benen’s info came from this New York Times article, the relevant section of which is reprinted below.
Shortly after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said, Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of banning some books, though she never followed through and it was unclear which books or passages were in question.
Ann Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.
The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.
In 1996, Ms. Palin suggested to the local paper, The Frontiersman, that the conversations about banning books were “rhetorical.”
Dude.
UPDATE THE SECOND: Since there seems to be some question as to whether trying to have books with ‘inappropriate language’ removed from library shelves ‘counts’ as censorship, I thought I’d actually print the relevant section from the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom page:
What Is Censorship?
Censorship is the suppression of ideas and information that certain persons—individuals, groups or government officials—find objectionable or dangerous. It is no more complicated than someone saying, “Don’t let anyone read this book, or buy that magazine, or view that film, because I object to it! ” Censors try to use the power of the state to impose their view of what is truthful and appropriate, or offensive and objectionable, on everyone else. Censors pressure public institutions, like libraries, to suppress and remove from public access information they judge inappropriate or dangerous, so that no one else has the chance to read or view the material and make up their own minds about it. The censor wants to prejudge materials for everyone.
Emphasis mine. I hope that’s clear now. That’s the definition I’m using.
See, this is what I’m talking about as far as people’s partisanship running ahead of the facts. Book banning? Censorship? Book banning or censorship is when a book cannot be published or sold, or when government agents go into your home to remove books and throw them on a burn pile. Libraries don’t have unlimited budgets, so they don’t all have a copy of every book sold. And public librarians are certainly employees of the government. So every time a librarian makes a decision to not buy a book, is it censorship? Is there an examination of whether librarians’ political or social views come into play when they decide whether or not to buy a book? Or are only elected officials to be so accountable?
Now, if then-Mayor Palin went outside the process to get some books from being purchased by the library or to get ones taken out that were already in there, then criticism of her actions on that basis is well founded. But from the above post it sounds to me like what happened was that she asked what the process was.
If I can’t buy or read a book because the government has suppressed it, that’s censorship. If the executive body of a government (whose job it is to run the library) has decided not to buy copies of the book and put it in the library, that’s not censorship. The fact that some librarian has had an elected official question his or her judgement does not in and of itself horrify me.
What we have here is someone falsely applying emotionally loaded terms to a situation to misrepresent someone’s actions for partisan advantage. A shorter way to describe this is as a lie.
I reserve judgement on the particular situation until I hear what books we are talking about.
All right, I haven’t had time to read the whole story, but I don’t like the smell of it from here. I tell my local library what I think they should get all the time, and sometimes they actually get it for me. But it’s their choice and there’s other folks can weigh in like I do. Including those elected to some position. But the ones that might have power to enforce it, that’s another situation.
I would never try to tell them *not* to get something, however lame it might be, because if they get it, a whole bunch of folks will be spared the effort of buying it. (I know this same effect might hurt sales of books I do like, but look, I’m between jobs.) But anyone who might try to get some book hidden away so no one could ever either learn from it or call bullshit on it, that scares me.
I think we don’t have enough info yet on what Palin actually did in that town with that library; I also think it would be good to find out. It would be interesting to hear Emmons’ side of the story.
RonF, angipurtus hit it on the head.
Asking a library TO BUY a book is permissible. It is permissible even if the eventual purchase cuts into the library budget enough to prevent the purchase of another book. It is permissible because the other “unpurchased” book is incidental to the request.
So if you ask the library to acquire “Why the US is the best country in the world and all other countries suck” and they do, and as a result they don’t buy “why Heather has two mommies” that is not your fault.
Asking a library NOT TO BUY a book is unpermissible, or more accurately, is wrong. It is an attempt to exercise censorship even if the library would not, as it happens, have ended up buying it anyway.
Attempts to exercise censorship are bad.
But this strikes me as really odd:
We are not talking about First Amendment violations here, we are talking about censorship.
Let’s say that the U.S. government agrees that anyone who wants to can write books which criticize Bush. But absolutely no federal funds will be given to any library who buys the book, and no federal funds can be used to support or purchase the book. This is UNLIKE all the other books on all other subjects, for which federal funds go to libraries unrestricted, and which can be bought without restriction using those funds.
You are saying that would not be censorship? What IS it, then?
The Anchorage Daily News quotes letters Palin gave to the chief of police and the librarian – each of whom had publicly supported a rival mayoral candidate – as follows: ”I do not feel I have your full support in my efforts to govern the city of Wasilla. Therefore I intend to terminate your employment [after a two week notice period].” For undisclosed reasons, Palin rescinded the librarian’s dismissal before the notice period expired; the librarian has declined to discuss the matter.
(A federal judge later upheld Palin’s right as mayor to dismiss employees such as the chief of police at will.)
I Said:
RonF Said:
Damn, you’re predictable.
Ron, maybe you should read up on the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom page, which explains this stuff pretty clearly.
—Myca
You go after the books, you’ve gone too far (well, the Republicans went too far with that whole war thing, but you know what I mean)
Just thought I should inform you guys – there’s a supposed list of books Palin asked to have removed circulating on email lists right now. This list is the fakest thing that was ever fake and some of them hadn’t even been printed when the dispute occurred, so if you see it, ignore.
But, a mayor trying to exercise control over her small town’s reading habits? That’s not very small-government-individualistic-don’t-abuse-executive-power-conservative of her, is it? What the hell kind of creep is she, to worry about what I might be reading at the library while she has a town to run? And if I and all my friends ask the library to buy a book that’s on her no-list, what then?
I don’t care what word you want to use to describe that – it’s ideologically absurd on her part, and it’s creepifying from our POV.
Yeah, I’ve seen it too, and it’s clearly bullshit, which is why I didn’t talk about it here. From what I’ve heard, the list that’s circulating is taken from here, which is obviously incorrect.
—Myca
Eh. There’s not enough information here to reach a conclusion. The only speaking witness is a partisan opponent of Palin; doesn’t mean she’s lying, but I imagine it means she has a point of view.
From the set of facts presented, this could have been anything from Palin asking the librarian, “a lot of people are asking me about such-and-such explicit book, is there a way to make sure we don’t have anything like that in the library?” and being rebuffed, to Palin showing up with an angry mob demanding that they burn every copy of “Our Bodies, Ourselves”.
Robert said:
Well, the first article quotes John Stein, former mayor of Wasilla, who’d helped Palin get into politics originally. So we’ve got 2 eyewitness reports, as well as news stories from the time, and the matter of the librarian’s firing, which is public record.
We’ve also got this from today’s Anchorage Daily News:
So, counting Emmons, that’s three eyewitnesses, multiple news stories going back to 1996, and letters and records of the firing that are in the public domain.
Now, nobody is saying that any books were actually removed. This is good.
It does seem, though, that the reason books weren’t removed is that Emmons refused to remove them, and was fired for it. This is bad.
—Myca
Removing books from the library is a bit different from influencing the choice of which books to buy. I still would like to know what criteria Palin used to gauge inappropriateness. I would certainly consider some books more worthwhile than others. (Anybody else here have pre-teen daughter(s)? Mine has taken a shine to the Clique series, which is about the most self-centered, crassly materialistic, mean bunch of girls in the known universe, and which overpriced designer clothing they are wearing this week. But I digress.)
Once the books are in the library, though, they’d have to be pretty egregious — child pr*n or, well, can’t think of anything else — for me to want them taken out.
Do I want Government officials sweeping through the library and taking books out they don’t like? No. If conservatives do it this week, liberals may do it the next. And without going into details I spent a whole lot of time in a library when I was a kid from 6 years old through high school – I love libraries. But there are reasons to have or not have a given book/newspaper/magazine in the library. Librarians’ opinions in these matters are not infallible and are subject to review, and that review will be by elected officials when we are talking about public libraries. No decisions in a publicly funded institution should be independent of review by elected officials. A damn good case should and hopefully would have to be made, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not makable. If it turns out that then-Mayor Palin’s reasons were flaky, fine. But the fact that the librarian was aghast doesn’t move me. As was noted above, we have insufficient information to tell whether now Gov. Palin’s actions were justified or not.
I’ve seen a librarian who bought a subscription for Playboy for a high school library – and no, she didn’t rip the pictures out. Do you think that’s appropriate? Do you think that it would have been inappropriate for an elected official to get involved?
Suppressing and removing information from public access strikes me as an absolute statement, as do the terms censorship and book banning. Removing a book from a library reduces public access to that information slightly, but in the face of book stores, blogs, newspapers, various reference and news web sites, Amazon, etc., it does not constitute removing it from public access and doesn’t fulfill the definitions of book banning or censorship.
She’ll fit right in with the rest of the republican party than. Their devotion to small government (and fiscal discipline) lasted about as long as it took them to get into power. Now it’s all about Family Values and National Defense.
RonF, you just let me know if this was about Playboy in the kid’s section, OK?
Otherwise, stop with the straw man, willya?
I don’t know what it was about. And apparently, neither does anyone else. We don’t know if it was Playboy in the kids’ section or the Quran in the reference section. But that doesn’t stop the partisans from going straight to describing it as “book banning”. Now, books have been banned in America. There was a time when you could get arrested for bringing Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer into the country or sending it through the mails. Books have been banned from publication and distribution in America. But it hasn’t happened for a long time. And trying to equate this unknown situation where someone inquired on pulling a book out of a public library to “book banning” is the straw man.
BTW – the situation I described actually happened. It was in my high school when I was a sophmore, and I saw the magazine myself.
Actually, we do. We know that it was an inquiry as to how to remove books with ‘inappropriate language’. I doubt that Palin would need to retreat to the ‘inappropriate language’ dodge if we were talking about a copy of Hustler in the toddler’s section.
Also, this wasn’t a high school library. Also, you know that full well. Also whatever you saw as a sophomore in your high school library is really really fucking irrelevant, and you know that too. Cut that shit out, and do it now.
Of course no books were censored. The reason no books weren’t censored is that Emmons refused to censor them, and was fired for it.
Read the definition of censorship I posted above, especially the bolded section. Read the ALA’s Intellectual freedom page. This was attempted censorship.
As for any partisan content, I would absolutely respond the same to any politician on the left or right attempting to remove books from a public library due to ‘inappropriate language.’ One of the reasons I’ve been in dust-ups with radical feminists here in the past is that I oppose the censorship of pornography. One of the reasons I didn’t support Hillary Clinton is that I opposed all of her video game nonsense.
But the thing is, both of those cases are far more understandable than trying to remove a book from a public library because of what it says. Which, to be honest, is what this is.
—Myca
Hey, what do you know–ANOTHER straw man!
Tropic of cancer was published in 1934.
So much like the Playboy allusion sets up the straw man that “only highly inappropriate books would ever be considered for censorship,” bringing up Tropic of Cancer in this context sets up a straw man that “this doesn’t happen any more.”
You might want to Google “heather has two mommies,” a book which i cited in my earlier post. You could also google, say, “books banned in 2007.” You could look here:
http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek.cfm
I look forward to your retraction.
Ron, when people disallow a book to be in a public venue, where else are they going to get it? We don’t all live in a city. There isn’t a bookstore where I live; the closest thing we have is Wal-Mart. The public library is pretty much it. Affectively, that’s banning everyone in this town from reading a book that was previously located in the library were someone to ‘request’ it taken out of circulation. It – was – there, and suddenly, it’s gone! Now, if someone said “Gee, could we get this book instead of that book when we take the new orders”, that’s fine, there’s only an allotted amount of funds available and we all can’t have what we want. Notice that choosing which literature to buy at a given time is not the same as saying “Thou shalt get rid of all copies of Black Beauty. And by the way, you’re not allowed to order any more or we’ll fire you”. That erroneous list they attributed to Palin is part of the list of commonly banned books. If I’m not mistaken, Harry Potter’s on ’em, along with Whitman and …a dictionary, if you can believe it. ‘Bridge to Taribithia’, no longer allowed. ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, ‘Black Beauty’, ‘Candide’ by Voltaire, all of which I own. I shudder to think someone actually yanked those books because of some sort of moral system foisted upon others. Your Playboy example is disingenuous at best, one librarian being foolish and ordering explicit materials intended for sex in the present day and age for a student library, no less, does not a consensus on stupidity for the lot make. I do wonder if you’d be in favor of pulling the hundreds of science, anatomy and art plate books out of the various libraries if someone didn’t like, say, a picture of the Statue of David. I can see it now …”Encyclopedias, Banned!” Hurmph.
Great points, A.W. and Sailorman.
Here’s the question for you, Ron: What books do you think this would be appropriate for? Not porno mags at the high school, mind you … nobody’s fooled by that bullshit … but what prose works for adult readers do you believe should be removed from a public library?
Which books should the government keep away from us?
—Myca
Myca: we know that it’s reported that she wanted books removed for “inappropriate language”. We don’t know if they were books for adults or books for children. We don’t know what she meant by inappropriate language, and I’m not really interested in anyone’s supposition as to what Gov. Palin’s judgement of “inappropriate language” is. I’m interested in the actual facts.
My example regarding Playboy was to highlight the fact that librarians are not infallible, and that their decisions are and should be subject to review. I have no idea if this actual incident is equivalent to that or not.
Sailorman, my example of Tropic of Cancer was to illustrate the difference between banning a book and removing it from a library. In looking through the site you cited, I saw examples of books that have been challenged for inclusion in libraries recently. Do you have any examples of books that have actually been banned recently?
Of the “10 most challenged list of 2007”, I’ve heard of a few of those books but I’ve only read one, Huckleberry Finn. I certainly agree that removing it from libraries is quite foolish.
A.W., you may not have bookstores in your area but the fact that you’re posting on this blog means that you have access to any book you want from Amazon or numerous other web sites.
Your Playboy example is disingenuous at best, one librarian being foolish and ordering explicit materials intended for sex in the present day and age for a student library, no less, does not a consensus on stupidity for the lot make.
No, it does not. Nor did I contend such. What it does do is illustrate the wisdom that a public employee’s actions are ultimately reviewable by elected officials, and that’s all it was intended to illustrate. The fact that you have a boss doesn’t mean your company thinks you’re stupid.
Myca, I’m not going to get into hypotheticals. We don’t know if these were prose books for adults or not. When an actual list of any books she was looking to have removed from the local library is revealed, I’ll be glad to offer my opinion on her judgement.
“A.W., you may not have bookstores in your area but the fact that you’re posting on this blog means that you have access to any book you want from Amazon or numerous other web sites.”
I suppose you’re assuming I have a credit card and extra funds to purchase those books, plus shipping and handling as well? Cute.
Here’s a few banned recently. Enjoy. The recent bannings are mixed in with the ones floating through the past few centuries, you can pick them out yourself.
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html
-Edited to add. Don’t forget to look up ‘Bowdlerism’. Roughly translates to “Let’s clean up bits of language and/or history we don’t like to acknowledge exists”.
“A.W., you may not have bookstores in your area but the fact that you’re posting on this blog means that you have access to any book you want from Amazon or numerous other web sites.”
“I suppose you’re assuming I have a credit card and extra funds to purchase those books, plus shipping and handling as well? Cute.”
…I mean really. What do you think a library is for? Inexpensive distribution of literature to large sections of the population. “Go buy it” does not fly here. Perhaps if it were a chain bookstore that’s refusing to stock or order a book, you’d have a case. Even then I’m doubtful; we all don’t have credit cards (or the funds, for that matter) and that shit’s expensive.
I can easily imagine cases where I think it would be appropriate for a mayor (or any other citizen) to request a book being reshelved or removed. For instance, if the library’s collection of “Playboy” were shelved in the kids section, to use Robert’s example. It’s unlikely, but it could happen.
However, it’s harder to imagine a librarian flat-out refusing to reshelve or remove, in a case like that. But unlikely as that sounds, it also could happen — there are strange individuals everywhere, including in libraries.
What’s completely implausible is a case of “Hustler in the kid’s section” in which the librarian refuses to make any changes; and so is fired; but the outcry from the small Alaskan town forces the mayor to unfire the librarian, and the librarian wins.
If the newspaper report isn’t wildly inaccurate, and if the whole town isn’t crazy, then whatever Sarah Palin considers a firing issue, is something that reasonable people in a small Alaska town didn’t agree was a firing issue.
Not, in other words, anything as clear-cut as Playboy in the kid’s section.
Ron, you seem to be arguing that we should give her the benefit of the doubt, unless we can come up with a verified list of books that she tried to ban.
But I don’t think that’s appropriate in this case. Sure, there’s a remote possibility that what she was trying to remove was kiddie porn or the like. But in the vast, vast majority of instances where a right-wing fundamentalist evangelical government official tries to remove books from a library, it’s stuff like “Heather Has Two Mommies”. Add that the reason given was for “inappropriate language”, and that she hasn’t come forth and cleared things up, and the already tiny chance that she was actually removing kiddie porn or the like nears zero.
When we cling to unreasonable possibilities and refuse to draw reasonable conclusions from what limited evidence we have, we effectively end up allowing and excusing inappropriate acts.
OK. And why are you bringing this up?
Why would that matter?
Just to remind you, we are not talking about that. We are not discussing the first amendment issues of book banning by governments. Sorry! Those are actually pretty rare, thanks to folks like the ACLU.
I know you would rather discuss that than the issue at hand, but I don’t want to side track there.
So to actually stay on topic (library removals) there is always Heather Has Two Mommies, which you may not have known to look for as I didn’t mention it in any of my earlier posts. That book was removed from children’s section because of “inappropriate” language but was put back after an eventual lawsuit.
There are plenty of others. But, ya know, I’m a bit hesitant to spend a whole lot of time researching other examples so you can nod, ignore them, and ask for more.
Hi. When I’m not a snarky cartoonist, I’m a librarian. Myca’s quote of the ALA’s position on Intellectual Freedom sums it up pretty well. But I just want to add my own two cents.
Removing a book from the shelves or relocating it to an area other than where its intended audience is considered censorship because it violates the rights of citizens to access that information.
Libraries do remove books — “weed” them — under strict guidelines. They tend to use the “CREW” method (though there are others.) When books are too worn out to use; when they are rendered irrelevant or useless as sources of information by the addition of sources that supersede them (this is very carefully applied, however); when they haven’t been used in so long that they take up space that could be used for books people want to read; when the topics covered by the books are no longer relevant to the collection and mission of the library.
For a fuller account of weeding, see the “CREW Manual” from the Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission: http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/ld/pubs/crew/background.html#whyweed
This is pretty standard practice.
But public librarians will not automatically remove materials from the shelves just because someone may object to them, no matter how powerful said someone may be. A public library is meant to serve the entire public, which includes a variety of information interests and needs. (My rule of thumb: If you don’t find something you object to in the library, then the selectors are doing their job.) It’s a pretty serious legal matter that has a long history of Supreme Court decisions upholding citizen rights of access to information based in readings of the 1st, 4th and 14th Amendments. Most libraries have a process of citizen redress — “challenges” — that a patron who has a serious and informed reason for removing or relocating a book goes through. So it can be done, but it is very rare and the standards are very rigorous.
I don’t know what Palin’s objections were or what she was objecting to. If these reports are true, they are pretty serious. The library director has a constitutional and professional obligation to uphold the rights of citizens to access all kinds of information, no matter how controversial. That means, for example, the library will have books on evolution next to books on Intelligent Design; “pro-choice” books next to “pro-life” books; etc., etc. I think the best approach is – if you don’t like a book, suggest a book that offers an alternative point of view. That serves our democracy better, IMHO.
Just to remind you, we are not talking about that. We are not discussing the first amendment issues of book banning by governments.
Yes we are. What else does the term “book banning” mean? The title here is “Sarah Palin: Book Banner?” and later on Myca says “And then there’s the book banning itself. In a just world, a sane world, a decent world, any attempt to ban a book would be met with disgust from all quarters.” Then-Mayor Palin’s attempted actions are being called book banning. My comment was that this was unjustified, and was an attempt to use an emotionally loaded term in an inaccurate fashion.
If you say that we are not talking about book banning then it seems you agree with me.
Ron, you seem to be under the misapprehension that a “ban” refers only to an absolute legal interdictment over an entire state or country. It doesn’t; look it up. Palin attempted to ban the book from the library’s collection. That is the plain and obvious word to describe her actions.
I disagree. The word “ban” can be applied in a number of ways, but the historical context of the term “book banning” is a government body preventing the overall publishing and distribution of a given work in a given area, and in extreme cases even ownership. Pulling it out of a library (despite what the ALA self-servingly claims) is not a “book ban”. What happened to Tropic of Cancer is. What happens to Bibles (and probably Torahs and other non-Islamic scriptures) in Saudi Arabia is. And condemning equating the two has nothing to do with whether or not I approve of what Palin did; that has to remain in question until the facts are known.
Ron,
Would you be happier if the title of this piece were Sarah Palin & Book Censorship?
The problem is that Sarah Palin is not a politician in 1930’s US of A or in Saudi Arabia. She is running in 2008, in a country where your definition of book banning is not as clear cut as you are making it. Many people in the US do care about censoring library books, despite that there are countries that have it worse than us in regard to book accessibility. Yes, we have it better than them; no, my community still has lofty goals as to what it wants book availability to be regardless of your examples.
Now, imagine you like whatever terminology is being used here, and it matches with the arguments you are hearing from other posters. Would that change your argument in regard to taking books off the shelves at a library? Because, the use of the term “ban” notwithstanding, that is what this thread is trying to be about. Not your high school, not 1930’s America, not Saudi Arabia. It’s not supposed to be a pedantic thread about the term “book banning”. Please save it for the open thread, or ask someone to start it?
Functionally, to successfully challenge a book in a library’s collection is equivalent to banning a book. The book is removed, and new copies will never be selected for purchase again. If that is not a “banned” book, then what is it?
And why is it “self-serving” of the ALA to view it as such?
Because the ALA is on the wrong side of the argument, Kevin. Don’t you watch TV?
/snark
And why is it “self-serving” of the ALA to view it as such?
Because if we removed all potentially offensive books from the library, we’d have no collection and the members of the ALA would have no jobs?
But seriously, RonF, I’d like to hear how you picture the selfish interests of the ALA.
Actually, as information has come in, this looks to me like a real mistake made by Palin. She should not have brought it up with the librarian.
Of course, when someone first starts doing executive-branch jobs, this kind of thing does occur. Executives, unlike legislators, are expected to be proactive and to take actions beyond convening hearings or drafting laws. It’s pretty easy to overstep the boundaries when you’re first learning a job.
Palin, of course, has been an executive for years now. She’s learned where the boundaries are and what things are and are not within her authority. Fortunately, the attempted overstep of her executive authority happened at a very low level of government, and had no negative effects. (The books weren’t banned, and the librarian ended up keeping her job.)
I wonder if there are jobs out there where this kind of mistake would have much more drastic consequences? Levels of executive authority where on-the-job training has potential results far more serious?
I dunno. I certainly can’t think of any. ;)
Fortunately, the attempted overstep of her executive authority happened at a very low level of government…
Except, of course, the firing of the Public Safety Commissioner did not happen years ago at a very low level of government. Instead, the incident w/ the librarian (and the police chief) seem to indicate a pattern.
“Palin’s choice to replace Monegan, Charles M. Kopp, chief of the Kenai police department, took the position on July 11, 2008. He resigned on July 25 after it was revealed that he had received a letter of reprimand for sexual harassment in his previous position.”
But perhaps there’s something to this. John McCain lacks executive experience, and he does hire a lot of lobbyists (who kept lobbying from his bus). ^_^
hf:
While there are such things as private libraries, I am going to guess that the majority of ALA members are public employees. By equating removing books from libraries to book banning they are throwing up an emotional image so as to attempt to remove their decisions from scrutiny by elected officials.
Which does not automatically justify the actions of public officials demanding the removal of a book from a library. There’s plenty of bad examples of that to go around and around and back again, and any attempt to do so should be subject to public scrutiny. But accusing Palin of book banning substitutes an emotional accusation for a factual exposition and examination of what she actually did.
Plaid:
A public official that has executive authority over a public library has the responsibility to review the decisions of the staff underneath him or her, including their acquisition decisions. That includes the responsibility (not just the right) to have a book removed if they think that the library staff has exercised poor judgement. Given that elected officials are hardly infallible and the possibility of politics entering into their decisions, it’s not something they should do lightly nor should it go without review by the public. But it’s something that has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis – I don’t see how you can say “it should never be done” anymore than you can say “elected officials should be free to do so.”
I also don’t think it’s a pedantic issue to debate the term. Flooding the political debate with unjustified emotional charges chases rational evaluation of the candidates and is right out of the 1984 playbook.
By equating removing books from libraries to book banning they are throwing up an emotional image so as to attempt to remove their decisions from scrutiny by elected officials.
Unless the elected officials object to book banning by librarians, in which case their sinister plan to cloak any librarian’s whim in the guise of principle would backfire.
Bingo.
Links and evidence for this statement, please.
I ask because the Supreme Court has ruled that books cannot be removed from a public library because of community disapproval of the content or ‘unorthodox’ views contained within. That case, the 1982 Board of Education v. Pico, was about a school library, so it seems reasonable that protections for a non-school library would be even stronger.
Anyway, yeah. Links and evidence please.
Or did you just make it up?
—Myca
And as long as you’re still hammering away on the idea that this is a partisan attack, I’d like to point out that the tendency of the right to invent ‘rights and responsibilities’ for the executive branch that aren’t backed up by the constitution, the courts, or any established law is part of why I think the whole ‘we’re the party of small government’ thing is a load of crap.
Right. Government just small enough to fit inside our bedrooms and libraries.
—Myca
Having worked for a newspaper which had been part of the newspaper section of the public library for years before being “discontinued” (not by the librarian but her boss in City Hall) along with another weekly after writing critical articles about the city, it’s fortunate that there are organizations like the ALA which advocate and educate people on book banning and censorship including at libraries. Public protest led to the reinstatement of both newspapers so I guess they weren’t so inappropriate after all but maybe poor judgment by the administrators of the city who ordered them removed.
During a successful attempt to ban Robert Cormier’s the Chocolate War (which has spent many a year in the top five of banned books) from the high school libraries of six middle schools where it also had been sitting on shelves and read for years (as it was published in 1975 and the banning was around 1996), it’s also good to have organizations help advocate and educate people on these issues. Young adult authors like Judy Blume, Cormier, Katherine Patterson (who has had three of her books including Bridge to Terabithia challenged or banned were used to it. But when a book is successfully banned, it’s a real loss and it can be surprising. I thought the challenge of Chocolate War would lose but it didn’t.
Book banning or challenging in my area is mostly conservative based but then there’s mostly conservatives. I think the only book that I can think of off-hand that’s been challenged by different groups is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I think if a book has already passed a selection process and been in a library then if the mayor or boss of the librarian either takes it off the shelf or threatens them to do it to keep their job for example, then that’s censorship. If they merely inquire about it, that’s something to be concerned about as well although it’s not censorship at that point in time. Book selection processes do follow guidelines but most librarians are pretty good advocates for a variety of literature and not being afraid to stock their libraries with books that might be controversial because of themes they cover.
Most of the “censorship” is from school superintendents, school boards or school administrators and most of the institutions impacted are school curricula (i.e. reading lists) and libraries.
As for “at will” employees, they can be fired without providing any reason at all. It’s part of their contract. High-ranking public administrative management level positions are “at will” in many cities and counties.
Myca, I must confess that it seems obvious on the face of it that the decisions of someone in a government body are reviewable by their bosses, and that at some point that boss is a public official. Nobody doesn’t have a boss. Now, firing someone is subject to employment rules, union contracts, etc. – I’ve got no problem with the concept that people can’t be just up and fired because their boss got annoyed with them.
I’ll have to take a look at the case you cited.
Factcheck.org, who I generally respect, has today posted an article strongly suggesting that most of the criticism of Palin on the library issue is unfounded.
However, factcheck.org does not dispute any part of what Myca wrote about in this post. Some idiot (or some Republican ratfucker) has been circulating a list of books Palin tried to ban. That list is a baseless fabrication. Palin never had a list of books she wanted to ban (maybe she did in her head, but nowhere on paper or spoken).
However, Palin did inquire into how she would go about banning books, and whether having protesters picketing the library would make the librarian change her mind, and she did try to fire the librarian. It is not clear why she tried to fire the librarian, and she may have tried to fire the librarian even before she was rebuffed about the possibility of banning books, but it is not clear that the rebuffed interest in banning books did not play a part in the attempted firing.
My bold. But hellyes. 8 years of reblican party rule and nothing was done to limit or shrink the government.
Same argument applies to ‘fiscal discipline’.
Myca, your comments on the Republican party’s practices vs. rhetoric with regards to small and non-intrusive government are right on the money, and you’ll find plenty of people on Free Republic who would agree with you.
OTOH, your accusation from the other thread that I hold that ‘IOKIYAR’ in this regard would only hold true if I accused Democrats of book banning if they had done the same thing. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that people who would attempt to remove Huckleberry Finn from school libraries would tend as a group to have more Democrats than Republicans. But that’s not “book banning” either. There’s plenty of other places to get the book.
I’m not saying that taking books out out libraries is a great idea; I had said that it’s within the executive authority, but that such a decision should be reviewable.
Of course, I was thinking more about public review, not judicial review, such as the committee that was put together in the case you cited. From what I can see, and I haven’t read it all yet, it seems that the executive has some authority to do so, but there are limits based on the motives of the executive. The minority of this 5-4 decision would grant more authority that the majority did, and I find myself agreeing with the minority. But even the majority doesn’t say the executive can’t do so at all. I’ll grant that the Supremes put more limitations on that authority than I think is proper and than I stated, so I was wrong there. But they didn’t cancel it either.
I wonder. One of the reasons given for removing those books was that they were “anti-Christian”. I wonder if that would fly if the authority also looked through the library and pulled books because they were “anti-Islam” or “anti-Hindu” or “anti-religion” in general (remembering that this is a school library and not one open to the general public)? I have to finish the decision to see if they gave a positive statement on what kinds of motives were or were not acceptable.
Wow, Myca, you’ve been compared to a freeper. You’re not going to take that lying down, are you?
;)
IME, books which are criticized for being “anti-Christian”, rarely are.
Ron, the problem is that your argument can be summed up as:
1) “I disagree with the commonly accepted definitions of words”
and
2) “I believe that mayors have the legal right and responsibility to do things that they, in fact, do not have the legal right or responsibility to do.”
Both of those are interesting I guess, in terms of your understanding of the world, but neither really have much impact on this discussion.
Why is there such upset even though no books were actually removed from the library? Because the question indicates a basic lack of understanding as to the function and process of a library.
—Myca
Myca:
So, then, do you grant that your comment that I was of the opinion that ‘IOKIYAR’ was not, in fact, accurate?
As far as “removal of books from library” = “book banning”, I contest that it’s the commonly accepted definition of the phrase. It was not my reaction at all, certainly.
With regards to the ability of the executive to remove books from a public library, in the case you cited the Supremes denied that the executive authority had the right to do so in that case, but they didn’t close the door entirely on it. Tell me this; let’s say that back in the day when I was a sophomore in High School the principal of the school had shared the librarian’s opinion that Playboy belonged in the school’s library. Would you hold that the School Board then had no authority to have it removed? I guess the alternative would have been to fire the librarian and hire one that would do the job, but that seems to be a non-optimal approach to the problem.
I have a real hard time with the idea that a public employee’s decisions cannot be challenged by their boss.
Would you hold that the School Board then had no authority to have it removed?
I hold that there’s a big difference between a school library and a public library, and your throwing in the school library just confuses the issue.
I have a real hard time with the idea that a public employee’s decisions cannot be challenged by their boss.
By “challenged” you’re referring to firing the employee, right?
So when Officer Bob decides that today’s not a good day to arrest all the Black people in town, you would have a real hard time with the idea that his boss can’t fire him for that? That seems pretty outrageous, but it logically follows from what you said.
Firing an incompetent employee and replacing them with a competent employee is obviously within the responsibilities of a boss. I’m not sure why you would want a mayor to micromanage an incompetent librarian who insisted on shelving Playboy on the bottom shelf and classifying The Story of O as young adult or stocking up the DVD selections with hard-core porn (or any other silly and irrelevant examples, that isn’t what Palin was unhappy with, and we all know it). Personally, I’d expect a mayor to fire a librarian like that and hire a new one. If Palin had had legitimate complaints against the librarians book choices (relative to the accepted standards of the profession), she wouldn’t have had a problem firing the librarian.
A boss should fire an employee for incompetence or misconduct, but not for legitimate performance of the employees job according to the standards of her profession. Firing a librarian for refusing to exclude books from the collection because those books offend someone is like firing an accountant for not cooking the books. It isn’t legitimate.