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Like other sensible citizens, I generally ignore contrived occasions like National Pickle Week, Welsh History Month and Great American Smoke-Out Day. Occasionally, though, these concern something important, like Banned Books Week, which started Saturday.
Banned Books Week comes from the American Library
Association, the American Booksellers Association and
similar groups. They want to promote the freedom to
read
and call attention to threats of censorship in our
republic.
Since what I read is my business, that seems fair, but
I'm not Focus on the Family, which last week held a press
conference in Chicago and called on the ALA to stop the
name-calling, stop the hysteria and stop deceiving
Americans through its agenda-driven promotion of Banned
Books Week.
Well, I'm all for stopping deception, name-calling and hysteria, and Focus on the Family could help here by halting its own campaign of deception, name-calling and hysteria.
Let's start with deception. Focus has allies,
unmentioned in its press release, among them an Ohio
resident named Phil Burress, who's promoting Family
Friendly Libraries Week
in lieu of Banned Books
Week.
Burress, who claims to be a recovering porn addict,
observes, Right to read? It's a bunch of hogwash. You
don't have the right to read anything you want. We have to
protect each other from dangerous material.
Focus, while trying to hide the Burress lamp under a
bushel, is indeed trying to protect us. It attacked public
libraries (havens of explicit pornographic literature)
in its magazine and in a fund-raising letter (libraries
target children as young as 10 years old with topics
such as bestiality, gang rape, sexual promiscuity,
masturbation, homosexuality, incest, sodomy, etc.)
So, even though Focus says it opposes censorship, it's attacking libraries for not censoring materials. That's deceptive.
Besides, the only single book at hand with accounts of promiscuity, gang rape, masturbation, incest, sexual mutilation, polygamy, etc. is the Bible, which has been banned more than any other book in history. For some reason, I doubt that Focus is trying to suppress that book.
Further, the promotion of Family Friendly
Libraries
is deceptive, since it implies that public
libraries are currently hostile to families. I've been in
dozens of libraries. Except for corporate research and
reference collections, they've all had children's books and
story hours and other family-friendly stuff.
If Focus followers went to libraries, they'd know better than to imply that libraries are hostile to families.
What does Focus have against libraries, anyway? As the
Whole Earth Catalog once stated, Libraries are the only
nice thing that towns do for smart kids.
A
free-thinking heretic might thereby conclude that Focus has
something against intelligence, even of the youthful
variety.
As for name-calling, Focus says Banned Books is
agenda-driven.
An agenda is just a list of things
you want to accomplish; any organization that gets much of
anything done doubtless has an agenda.
That is, Focus on the Family has an agenda (apparently,
to control all of us under the guise of protecting
families and children
), and is thus just as
agenda-driven
as the groups it attacks for being
agenda-driven.
Then there's hysteria. Focus produced its own poster child, an 8-year-old Florida girl whose teacher stuffed her ears with cotton after the girl objected to a horror story the teacher was reading to the class.
This, of course, has nothing to do with public libraries and is a matter for the local school board.
As for hysteria about censorship, well, there are some things worth getting hysterical about, and my right to read whatsoever I damn well please, and our public libraries' obligation to serve the entire community rather than the Focus Followership, are among those matters I deem worthy of hysteria.
But all this agenda talk has me wondering. What is the real agenda behind Family Friendly Libraries Week?
They want to protect children from lurid material -- although I've yet to see evidence that lurid material in any way harms children.
But for sake of argument, let's grant that it does. So why can't the Focus people pay attention to what their children read? Why do they want librarians to do it for them?
Could it be that they're so busy promoting their
family friendly agenda
with press conferences, radio
broadcasts, speeches and other hustles for donations that
they don't have time to pay attention to their own family
matters?
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