Seriously, you had to know it wasn’t going to stop with banning drag shows.
Let’s close the libraries in Missouri. They’re just full of seditious blasphemy.
Republicans in the Missouri House of Representatives have voted to defund their state’s libraries after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the state for banning numerous LGBTQ+ books as “explicit sexual” materials.
The April 4 vote removed $4.5 million of state budget funding for libraries as well as “costs for diversity initiatives, childcare, and pre-kindergarten programs,” WCPT 820 Radio reported. The removal now requires an additional state house vote and state senate approval before heading to the governor’s desk to become law.
In Texas, they’re starting small. Give ’em time.
A small Texas county is weighing whether to shut down its public library system after a federal judge ruled the commissioners violated the constitution by banning a dozen mostly children’s books and ordered that they be put back in circulation.
The Llano County commissioners have scheduled for Thursday a special meeting in which the first item on the agenda is whether to “continue or cease operations” at the library.
You might wonder what horrible books they tried to ban.
The books that Llano County officials removed from the library shelves include Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”; “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti; the graphic novel “Spinning” by Tillie Walden; and three books from Dawn McMillan’s “I Need a New Butt!” series.
Last year, an assistant principal at a Mississippi elementary school was fired after he read “I Need a New Butt!” to a second-grade class. The reason? Because the book used words like “butt” and “fart” and included cartoon images of a child’s butt.
Also removed from the library were Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen”; Robie H. Harris’ “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health”; and four other children’s picture books with “silly themes and rhymes,” like “Larry the Farting Leprechaun,” “Gary the Goose and His Gas on the Loose”; “Freddie the Farting Snowman” and “Harvey the Heart Has Too Many Farts,” according to the complaint.
I guess we’ve moved beyond hiding the books that talk about sex and race to silencing anything that mentions farts. Don’t straight white people do that, too?
Nope. What miserable, humuorless, willfully ignorant puritans. (But I repeat mysefl thrice.)
Pretty soon you’re all going to have to visit Minnesota (and California, and New York, and Washington, and a few other places) if you want to check out a book. The Midwest and South are going to be vast wastelands empty of anything intellectual, with wandering hordes of Republican zombies looking for brains to eat.
The poor things will surely starve to death.
Next come the book stores. And it ain’t stopping there…
Farts are the divine will expressing itself.
In most places, most of the time, libraries are considered “amenities”.
Amenity, “a desirable or useful feature or facility of a building or place.”.
Our local library is supported in part by a voter bond levy and is wildly popular and heavily used.
It’s not just books.
There is a large children’s area, teen area, music CDs, movies to check out, graphic novel collection, printers, 3-D printers, paperback section, and the usual large bank of public high speed internet computers.
It’s an important resource for low income people, homeschoolers, and the homeless population.
Closing the library would blow a big hole in the community.
It would also be seriously unpopular and unlikely to happen.
If children understand their bodies, it’ll be that much harder to turn them into shameful, self-hating, neurotic wrecks. And then how will we ever get them to vote Republican?
This isn’t the first time the oogedy boogedy xians have attacked libraries. In fact, libraries are perennial targets of theirs.
In the early 2000’s the local fundies demanded that the public library put Net Nanny software on all the public internet computers so that their children couldn’t access porn sites.
The library pointed out that…
.1. They weren’t in the business of babysitting the children of fundie xians. It was the parent’s job to raise their own kids, not the librarians’ job.
.2. Nevertheless, they compromised and set up a children’s computer area with filters and labeled one adult computer with “Net Nanny” safe searching software.
No one ever used the Net Nanny computer except me. It was always free and I didn’t care.
The same principle still holds.
It’s not up to the public libraries to supervise your children.
That isn’t their job.
Being a parent is the job for the…parents.
It would seem that if you object to what your children might find in the library, rather than close down the libraries, maybe you should just keep your children out of them instead.
It has been pointed out that the Missouri State Constitution requires that libraries be funded. So defunding them is unconstitutional without adjusting the constitution and that’s harder I believe.
Sorry Minnasota. All the states starting with M look alike to me
Nope, I was right in the first place. Never mind.
These people long for a return of the culture that gave us the Hays Code in motion pictures: No nudity or mention of sex or other “vulgar” biological functions; violence is bloodless, sterile, and the “good guy” wins in the end; no one is allowed to question the government, the military, the police, the Church, etc.. Just beautiful, “family friendly” movies starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire…
WAIT! FRED ASTAIRE WAS A MAN WHO DANCED IN HIS MOVIES! THE GAY AGENDA REARS ITS UGLY HEAD! IS NOTHING SACRED!?!?
Missouri constitution Article IX Section 10:
” Free public libraries—declaration of policy—state aid to local
public libraries.—It is hereby declared to be the policy of the state to promote the
establishment and development of free public libraries and to accept the obligation of
their support by the state and its subdivisions and municipalities in such manner as may
be provided by law. When any such subdivision or municipality supports a free library,
the general assembly shall grant aid to such public library in such manner and in such
amounts as may be provided by law.”
ATM it is a meaningless law. To make it stick they either need to find a judge who will interpret ‘shall grant’ as meaning ‘if they feel like it’ or change the constitution. Of course, pending legal challenge, they could seriously fuck up many if not most libraries even if the court ruled they had to restore withheld funds.
@Ariaflame #9:
They don’t care about the state constitution. All they care about is the political performance, of being seen by their braindead voters to be passionate about improving children’s lives by, er, removing the primary municipal source of self-improvement offered free to all children.
And if they should manage to take things as far as changing the constitution, you can be damn sure that there’s a wealthy Republican waiting in the wings to swoop in, buy up the libraries and their stock, cleanse them of all demonic filth, staff them with church volunteers and sell memberships to citizens at a clear profit, just like the good lord intended.
And when I say ‘cleanse’ I don’t mean hold a fire sale, I mean sell tickets to the fire.
True story. Back in the ’80s, when I was a wee lad, I was in a video rental place when some guy started ranting about what horrible filth the place was renting, waving a VHS tape in his hand frantically… that movie? “The Gay Divorcee.”*
*I don’t think it meant what he seemed to think it meant.
Not sure Repugs ever want anything at all to do with brains.. zombies or not.
For clarity of course my “Nope” @ #1 was directed at the title question – “You didn’t think it was only going to affect the gays and the transes, did you?”
Not the final question of “Don’t straight white people do that,(fart) too?”
Incidentally, don’t these laws and book bannings violate the First Amendment when it comes to freedom of expression as well as the whole ideals of “pursuit of happiness and iberty for all” and what are the odds that Trump’s treason SCOTUS will end up ruling on them?
it’s regularly pointed out that these laws designed to harm varying marginal people is going to have splash damage and unintended victims, and i feel like that’s the whole point. we already have such laws. the unintended victims who have a leg up in the social hierarchy already get relief from prosecutors who don’t bother with, juries who identify with, and judges who have sympathy for such people. they don’t see law as the enemy in these cases. they see themselves as appropriately enforcing and interpreting a law with correct intentions.
the common law system is kindof a fucking joke.
@ 16
Well, it mentions godless divorce! We all know how JEEZ-us felt about divorce.
True; but IIUC it won’t affect the St. Louis or St. Louis County libraries which are membership organizations that don’t rely on tax money. This will mostly affect the rural areas of the state.
I know homeschoolers have networks where they share resources, but in our central MN town, the homies make great use of our public library. Could it have an effect on them in the states planning to shut libraries down?
@16. UnknownEric the Apostate : ““The Gay Divorcee.”**I don’t think it meant what he seemed to think it meant.”
Wonder if that klown has even heard of Oscar Wilde – or despite supposedly having read his Bible King David and his relationship with Prince Jonathon let alone Achilles and Patroklus or Alexander the Great and Hephaestion?
On the Transes (people) simply this :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pervertjustice/2023/04/11/debating-the-trans-question/
Yes.
While I’m not a parent, I am an older sister, and I think these joyless people have underestimated the joy small children takes in butts and farts. Scatological humor is a safe way of figuring out ‘how do taboos work, why is breaking them surprising and sometimes funny, and when is it (or is it not) appropriate to talk about this?’ without exposing kids to anything that is actually harmful to them.
Of course, the people who ban books probably don’t want kids to question taboo, even when it is something as simple as ‘farts and poop are more often than not inappropriate conversation topics’.
raven @ #7 — “This isn’t the first time the oogedy boogedy xians have attacked libraries. In fact, libraries are perennial targets of theirs.” Didn’t a mob of Christians burn down the library at Alexander in the way back machine? If so, then yeah, something of a history of it.
And then there’s this opinion piece in Washington Post by David Von Drehle about Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Amarillo judge and Chump appointee that just ruled against mifepristone. Drehle first outlines why Amarillo: because there’s only one judge and that’s Kacsmaryk so no lottery to which judge gets the case as in other venues. Why Kacsmaryk? He’s a raving Catholic. Appointed because he is a raving Catholic.
Frankly, I’ve held my nose and voted for a lot a Democrats in the last decades…rather than candidates for the “no chance in hell” party as I did when I was younger…because I realized that while Democrats are also evil and corrupt, they tend…and only tend…to be less draconian than Republicans. It’s been clear for years that Republicans were after the courts. That seemed like a bad idea to me, and we’re seeing the terrible results of their game plan now.
Some of them have an even larger goal: rewrite the Constitution. To their liking of course. They now control almost enough states, and enough votes in the US House and Senate, and enough of the judicial system to do just that.
So Terrence and Phil will get South Park banned once the Republicans extend their reach to cable TV?
Religion seems to expand to occupy all the political headroom that monarchs and the wealthy don’t want. I see no reason to expect anything else in the US – they’ll expand their control as much as they can, because the object of control is control.
For years, as a kid in the 80s, I wasn’t allowed to say “fart”. It was considered rude, vulgar, and unacceptable. It was thought of as just this side of a swear.
As an adult, I say fart. I also use the other f-word my parents couldn’t stand because fuck watching my language I’m a fucking adult.
Didn’t a mob of Christians burn down the library at Alexander in the way back machine?
Hypatia. They did more than burn the library.
Religion, as a system of political control, mutates like cancer in the body politic, seeking endlessly to find new things to control.
Abortion is a good example. It really wasn’t a political issue until american politicians decided to use it to whip up their base. Now, it’s a matter of life and death. But it has always been like this – ask the albigensians, or pretty much anyone who has wound up on the short end of the stick long enough to become a political target.
Tokugawa Ieyasu, the military ruler of Japan, observed this about christians so he decided the best way to keep them from expanding their power was to kill the lot of them. Generally horribly and publicly. His approach to dealing with christianity made it so that the christians steered pretty clear of Japan until the US empire put deranged christian fundamentalist Douglas MacArthur in charge of reconstruction and now christian nutters are a problem there, too. Tokugawa, as one of history’s great wielders of power, saw christianity for what it is and took the most effective step available. In that sense Tokugawa was a bit of the “I have a hammer and that makes you look like a nail” kinda guy.
Does this mean kids can’t read “Walter the Farting Dog” anymore? TYRANTS!!!
@ 25 robro
Didn’t a mob of Christians burn down the library at Alexander in the way back machine?
No, but it makes a good story.
The Library of Alexandria seems to have withered away for lack of funding. For its time it was huge and expensive to maintain. Funding was heavily dependent on the Pharaohs; once Rome took over Egypt the funding started to dry up.
Papyrus is a pretty delicate medium and it needs both careful curating and a lot of recopying. Without government funding …. Roman funding (private—I don’t remember ever reading about public funding though there may have been some) went to other libraries, mainly in Rome or other parts of Italy.
Some of Gaius Julius Caesar’s men may have damaged/torched some Library storage sheds near one of the harbours but there may not have been any books in them and besides that was pre-A.D.
IIRC, one outpost of the library was destroyed—I am not sure burned—during a political dispute between civic political parties but this was in the 4thC AD., long after it ceased to be a functioning library branch. Alexandrian politics were rough and we are talking full-scale riots, sieges, a bit of torture, murder, and so on.
Short answer: No. Longer answer, with minor qualifications to the short answer here.
@8
“It would seem that if you object to what your children might find in the library, rather than close down the libraries, maybe you should just keep your children out of them instead.”
Or… gasp! perish the thought! go with them to the library, and talk to them about what they see there…
Marcus @29:
I don’t know if he “saw christianity as it was”. He saw a threat to his power, and like multitudes of warlords before him and since (Japanese and other), sought to stamp it out. Buddhists are a problem? Kill ’em. Other daimyos a problem? Kill ’em. From what I’ve read, Ieyasu saw Christianity as subversive to authority (isn’t that a good thing?), as well as a foothold for possible Spanish/Portuguese invasions (a bad thing, for nationalist Japanese).
From what I’ve read, Ieyasu saw Christianity as subversive to authority (isn’t that a good thing?), as well as a foothold for possible Spanish/Portuguese invasions (a bad thing, for nationalist Japanese).
That’s what I meant by “seeing it as it was” – as a man who traded in what Kissinger called “realpolitik” Tokugawa would not have spared any thought for the question of whether christianity had a point or any useful moral teachings or truth to it – it appeared to him as a system of power, and as such it was inevitably going to oppose his absolutism. So: hammer a nail into it.
All authority is subversive to all other authority.
Autobot,
What about ‘flatus’?
KG @32: It’s fascinating how nonsense gets passed on according to one’s ideological preferences. There are two notable examples (not related to New Atheism) I still come across now and then.
One is the ‘epicycles-upon-epicycles‘ story, which claims that each planet requires multiple epicycles to render predictions accurate.
Another is the idea that Emmy Noether ‘saved’ General Relativity by proving that energy is conserved in GR. She actually proved that it wasn’t normally conserved in GR. A confusion between two important theorems she came up with, and a disservice to the important work she did.
Apparently, the Missouri state constitution explicitly requires the state government to fund all public libraries, and they have already been inundated with law suits as a consequence of it.
Marcus Ranum @29: It was actually Tokugawa’s predecessor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was responsible for starting Japan’s zero tolerance policy against Christianity.
Are they going against the venerable and immaculate Founding Fathers?
Benjamin Franklin himself authored, “Fart Proudly”!
Are they so anti-American they would ban Benjamin Franklin?
Far cry from 19th century Europe where crowned heads travelled to Brussels and Paris to see and hear Joseph Pujol perform.
And so here we are, where even farting is now an act of political rebellion. =|
An act of contemptuous defiance: “I fart in your general direction”.
I’m tempted to come up with lyrics for “I Need a New Butt” to the tune of “I Want a New Drug.”
@24. As an uncle, I have an entire arsenal of poop jokes.
@45 There’s a whole genre there.
“I don’t like the butts, but the butts like me.”
@46. dbinmn : An arse-nal? Apt butt you didn’t make it.. ;-)
KG: I heard a story that a Muslim sultan, not a Christian mob, had ordered the destruction of the library — or at least A library — in Alexandria. That would, of course, be at least 600 years after the events of the Tim O’Neill article you cited; so either it was a different library the sultan destroyed, or maybe what remained of “the” library after all the earlier troubles.
Avo, also nigelTheBold @41, they’ve already gone after Ben. Apparently, he was a commie, as he liked France.
I wish I was joking, but I’m not. Amazing how he embraced a system that only had a manifesto documenting it 60 years after his death, but reason and knowledge isn’t these folks strong suit.
@Raging Bee, a small part of the library was damaged by Julius Caesar in his civil war of 48 BC, but that was long into the decline of the library due to neglect by the Egyptian monarchy that started a century before.
Basically, call it the death of a library due to excessive overdue scrolls. Don’t maintain it and bring in current works, it’s pretty much equal to burning it to the ground, albeit slower.
The Romans ignored it and it essentially faded away around the 260’s AD and its remnant caught between armies during the Palmyrene invasion. The Serapeum, a daughter library was ordered destroyed in by a bishop in 391 AD, but by then there was no record of any books or scrolls left in the building, instead being a meeting place for a group of philosophers that the church quite disapproved of.
The riot that Hypatia was killed in occurred after she was meddling with the politics between the local Roman prefect and local political leadership’s reconciliation and well, politics in that era was rather a bloody and violent affair at times – especially when one plays against both sides and one’s stuck in the middle.
@ 50 wzrd1
The Serapeum! Thanks, I could not remember that name and it was too late to go hunting for it.
@ 46 Raging Bee
I heard a story that a Muslim sultan, not a Christian mob, had ordered the destruction of the library
IIRC that was the first story I read a few years ago (cough) when I was a teenager. Actually it was a caliph not a sultan.
It seems to be an “Insert name here” story. My guess is not that it was another library just a different “enemy” to libel. Next on the list, it was the Mongols!
Yes, I know thy never got there in force but they sent in a commando team cleverly riding on camels to avoid detection.
I heard a rumour that a couple of episodes of Bluey (a most excellent children’s TV programme) were deemed inappropriate and removed from Disney’s streaming platform.
Because of farts. One episode uses the word ‘fluffy’ and is superficially about whether someone farted. But really it’s about kindness, tolerance, and giving dignity to people (and so many other lessons).
As an Australian, banning a children’s show because of farts sounds absolutely bugfuck. But apparently this is a thing. It doesn’t even need the word ‘fart’.