Having spent the better part of the last two months working on a program for Banned Books Week, I couldn’t help but notice the buzz about Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin, which surfaced during a recent Time article:
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.
While people often dismiss attempts to challenge (and remove) certain books from public and school libraries as “over-reacting parents,” it’s slightly more disturbing when it comes from an elected official. Even if they’re doing it on behalf of complaints from some of their constituents, it shows a lack of understanding for the ramifications censorship embodies.
Sarah Palin is a great person.
Your blog post confirms my intuitions that Sarah Palin is a religious zealot. She has that “inflamed eyes” look whenever she speaks. I believe there are many more layers (dangerous ones) to this woman and that they will be uncovered in the next months. At least that’s my hope.
reading the full article, it seems that stein has an axe to grind with palin, on many issues. even time is in a hurry to point out that stein is pro-choice, creating an obvious slam job of a story. which is not surprising, coming from that fishwrap.
the cage liner that said in the early 80′s leading scientists are considering that the earth is going into an ice age. now it’s global warming. no its we’re all going to be covered in green nickelodeon slime.
it might also be pointed out that the dems are so desperate on palin, they’ve sent an army of lawyers and researches to alaska to dig up dirt on palin. which is all fine an dandy, but look for more minuscule items (she wore purple shows one day) to come up. how about we look at biden’s unpaid campaign bills? something about fiscal responsibility more concerning there.
I agree that Stein, along with many from Palin’s home state, have an axe to grind. But I didn’t really intend for this to be taken as a political post, rather I intended to simply highlight that this particular story makes an excellent example of why we (the American Library Association) sponsor Banned Books Week.
As a librarian, specifically one who works with genocide, I’m always amazed at how people think that limiting personal freedom is a good idea. This goes way beyond the political realm, as most challenges come from parents who merely want to remove their child’s exposure to X-Y-Z, while never thinking of what that means in the larger sense.
i’m with you on that – banning books only incites fear of the unknown and censorship sucks in general. if a parent is that concerned about what their child is reading, they should be all the more involved then. but really, if your kid is reading that much on their own, then what’s the problem? far better than johnny-on-the-xbox all day. (unless it’s halo).