http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/22/wisconsin.book.row/index.html
This case is interesting for a number of reasons. On the one hand, I think of myself as conservative (more so than the GOP, who should replace their elephant with a rhinoceros) but on the other hand, things like book-burnings fill me with a kind of horror. On the third hand of our freakishly nightmarish world, the original request to have sexually explicit books removed from young-adult to the adult section seems quite reasonable (except adults probably wouldn't read them, but that's not the library's fault).
It is, though, an example where a government institution, which should be respecting and promulgating the standards of the local community is, instead, trying to replace the standards of the local community with a new set of standards espoused by the federal government, and the people in the community are just supposed to suck up the kool aid. They have been doing this with public schools for a long, long time. Libraries too? I did not know that. Should have guessed, though.
Is this a case in which the library is trying to bring a culture of refinement and sophistication to a community of backward country clods? Maybe. Or maybe they're trying to carry on the government's caste-system building strategy to every part of the nation, inculcating their system of acknowledging some people as Protecteds and others as little people. I do believe that if a bunch of Protecteds got ornery with the library, Big G would step up and start doling out some sensitivity training for the library staff.
One interesting quote: "The demand to move the books was always going to be problematic because no authority has determined that any of the titles are pornographic or obscene," Tyree said.
As usual, one must find an "authority" to make judgments: little people are not qualified. What kind of system does this sound like?
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