People Who Can’t Get Books Banned From Libraries Are Now Hiding Them Or Throwing Them In The Trash
from the just-for-the-sheer-assholery-of-it dept
The “rule of law” folks (who also have a sizable overlap with the “party of free speech“) are at it again. Around the nation, legislators emboldened by the Republican party’s embrace of bigotry have been passing bills banning books (or, worse, subjecting librarians to criminal charges). Almost as often as a law gets passed, it gets sued out of existence, because most courts are more inclined to protect constitutional rights than throw their support behind close-minded people who think everyone should only have access to content they think is acceptable.
So, when the laws fail to survive constitutional challenges and/or fail to gather governors’ signatures, the “rule of law” people decide it’s time to take matters into their own hands. The sheer amount of pettiness on display here is astounding. Rather than respect the viewpoints and content preferences of others, stupid people are doing extremely shitty things to prevent others from accessing the content they’re seeking.
Here’s how that’s going, according to librarians interviewed by Maya Wilkins of the Chicago Tribune:
When the Crown Point Community Library underwent a building project at its Winfield branch, workers had to move the branch’s bookshelves. After they’d been moved, staff found books that had been hidden.
All books that were found had been challenged, said Julie Wendorf, the library’s director and president of the Indiana Library Federation.
“They’re mostly LGBTQ materials that are found under the shelves,” Wendorf said. “It’s quite suspicious that they would only be of that topic matter.”
Yeah, it’s super-weird that the only books being hidden by “patrons” are those they failed to get removed from the shelves lawfully. According to Wendorf, another popular tactic deployed by these terrible people is much less subtle: throwing the books into library trash cans.
And it’s not isolated to Indiana. Librarians are reporting the same activities in other states that have aggressively pursued book bans of LGBTQ+ content (along with historical depictions of US racist activities and policies), such as Texas, Florida, and Iowa.
It goes further than books that have been unsuccessfully challenged. In one library, an ill-willed individual decided to clear the “religion” section of books that didn’t agree with their preferred religion.
In 2023, a patron asked about Christian books, found them near Islamic books and moved more than 30 books throughout the library, either in between or behind shelves.
Yep, that’s the mentality we’re dealing with here in the US. And that’s why people who loudly support Trump and his sycophants scattered around the nation should never have their bad-faith arguments entertained, much less debated. These people have already decided your views don’t matter and that they’re willing to do whatever it takes to ensure no one stumbles across content they don’t like, no matter what age they are. These are ridiculous people that are, despite their mental, moral, and emotional limitations, capable of carrying out the harms the nation’s courts are doing their level best (in most cases) to prevent local governments from committing.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, book bans, censorship, free speech, indiana, libraries
Comments on “People Who Can’t Get Books Banned From Libraries Are Now Hiding Them Or Throwing Them In The Trash”
I’m surprised those assholes didn’t check the books out and burn them. That seems to be where we’re headed, after all.
(And where they burn books, they will eventually burn people…)
Re:
I can see why they didn’t check them out. After all, libraries keep track of who checked out what books, at least until they’re returned. So these assholes don’t want to have a pay a fine for a “lost” book.
Re:
If they check them out, they’re on the hook for paying for them when they can’t return them. Kind of defeats the purpose, at least for those with a modicum of intelligence.
Re:
There has also been a lot of checking out the disliked books by the parties and simply not returning them or throwing them out.
Sure, the library levies a fine. And in some cases is an outright criminal matter. But the enforcement of those fines is controlled by the city or county DA. The DA just conveniently declines to pursue the matter. Censorship via the backdoor of selective enforcement.
Re: Re:
Many public libraries have a “maximum penalty” limit in their overdue fines policy (generally something like $10, which is definitely less than the typical book, even before one accounts for acquisitioning costs).
Re:
Nah, then they’d have to pay for them.
Re: Re:
what makes me sad? This is far too accurate a reasoning.
Re:
At this point we should just get ahead of them to prove a point.
Get bible-burnin’.
(Not the people-burning part.)
Re: Re:
How about
NO.
Re: Re: Re:
…Alright, fair enough!
Re: Re: Re:
Eh, there’s no shortage.
i mean, don’t steal them. Use your own.
Re: Re: Re:2
As I said before:
Burning a book because you disagree with the content within it or hate the people who read it is a shitty thing to do regardless of your intent. Burn a Bible to troll a Christian and they’ll claim you want to do the same to actual Christians. You’ll also give them an opening to justify burning the books they’ve always wanted to burn with an “eye for an eye”–type argument. And all you will have accomplished by burning a Bible is making yourself look like one of book-burning assholes you want to decry.
Nothing good comes from burning books—or wanting to burn books. That opinion is 100% non-partisan.
Re:
Because they then have to pay the cost of the book, and that money is then used to either replace it either with the same book or one with similar content.
These people feel way too safe popping their heads out from under their rocks.
Koby, Matt, please tell us again how it is the left who are pushing censorship.
Re:
Right-wing “free speech” advocates when fellow right-wingers try to get rid of books in libraries by any means available to them: “This isn’t censorship, it’s people protesting speech.”
Right-wing “free speech” advocates when literally anyone else suggests they refrain from using a certain ableist slur: “FUCK YOU! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE TRYING TO TELL ME WHAT I CAN’T SAY AT GUNPOINT! LITERALLY 1984!”
Re:
Any leftwing censorship bills are functionally just rightwing nutjobs hijacking good intentions to push their own censorship agenda.
It’s the neocons in a leftist mask.
Re: Re:
KOSA for example.
This is 5 years ago now, but Colbert once responded to a story of someone hiding a library copy of Whose Boat is This Boat? by donating a special Unhideable Edition.
Everybody knows those people don’t read books – They are afraid they might actually learn something.
Funny how quickly the 'the public should decide' group flip on that one...
Bigots/Perverts: Libraries and those that run them have no business deciding for themselves what books the public should have access to, they are running a public resource and as such it should be up the to public to decide what is and is not acceptable for them to stock!
The public and/or courts side with the non-bigots
Bigots/Perverts: This is an outrage! How dare they not agree with my bigotry and/or perversion, I guess it’s up to me to decide on my own what books are and are not acceptable for the public to read!
Finally, an answer of what to do with library copies of the bible…
Common for decades
Christians hiding/throwing away books was common when I worked in a bookstore in the ’90s. We also had a Muslim guy who would reshelve the Religion section so that Korans would be on the top shelf.
Religion is never, ever a net positive.