I love the elegant symmetry in our First Amendment. It guarantees everyone’s right to say or write what is on their mind, but at the same time, it forces nobody to listen to or read it. Those are freedoms that go bone deep.
Libraries, particularly in an open society such as ours, are the repositories of the written product of those freedoms, and the secular temples of our shared culture. Cicero, the Roman statesman, once said, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
The Wyoming Freedom Caucus appears to disagree with Cicero, since they are making our libraries a battleground in their culture war, and they are using our kids for human shields in their attack.
I would hazard a guess that there are some books in our libraries that the puritan zealots in the Freedom Caucus don’t like. More likely, there are a lot of books that they don’t like. It may be more accurate to say that there are damn few books in our libraries that the Freedom Caucus likes.
There seems to be something in our millennia of shared human experience that was written down and stored in our libraries that gets Freedom Caucus granny panties in a twist. Something, perhaps, about politics different than theirs, strange religions that don’t fit their dogma, history that shocks them, or human sexuality that mortifies their prurient sensitivities.
So they attack libraries, and the folks who manage them. And, in the instance of HB194, the Freedom Caucus is hiding behind our children to promote their attack.
This bill, specifically aimed at libraries, criminalizes and penalizes almost anyone who exposes minors to “obscene” material. The bill’s language is so vague and broad (the legal definition of “obscene” is difficult enough to pin down) that the law of unintended consequences will almost surely apply.
For instance, I remember my brother and I sneaking into the bunkhouse at the ID and drooling over the titillating photos of boobs and butts in dog-eared copies of Playboy that the cowhands left laying around. Under HB194, Freedom Caucus book-banners could round up those horny bare-knuckle, gristly cowboys, throw them in the hoosegow for a year and fine them big bucks.
THAT would be fun to watch!
When anyone dares to push back against the Freedom Caucus’ evangelically zealous attempts to ban what is on our library shelves, they clutch their fake pearls and invoke “the kids!”. In self-righteous tones, they call their detractors “groomers”, and “pizza-gate pedo perverts”.
Horseshit.
If these linguistic inquisitors don’t want their kids exposed to the contents of our libraries, they should exercise a little parental control over their own children’s lives. But instead, they set themselves up as final arbiters of what everyone else can see or read.
If they feel that a library is not a safe place to nurture their young ‘uns minds, then they should insist that their kids go to church instead of a library. Because, who ever heard of a child being groomed and molested in a church?
It boils down to this: if you don’t want to read a book, don’t read it. If you don’t want your minor children reading a book, don’t let them read it. Libraries don’t force-feed anything to anyone.
Stepping into a library is a voluntary act, as is taking a book from a shelf. Taking your kids to a library is also a voluntary act, as is monitoring their intellectual inputs to keep them from learning things you don’t want them to know. Be a parent, for God’s sake!
But, mandating what anyone else or their kids can read is puritanical tyranny, and way above your pay grade.
