Hello everyone, and welcome to the nonprofits. The Huntsville Madison County Public Library
in Alabama faced controversy as books with LGBTQ plus themes were flagged for relocation,
including a children's book. The book entitled read Me a Story Stella by Marie
Luis Gay was mistakenly added into a list Excuse me added to a list of
potentially sexually explicit books? Why because the author's last name was Gay. This
incident raised concerns about extremist ideologies infiltrating the community's political milieu and prompted a review
of over two hundred and thirty titles. However, after internal and public criticism,
the process was halted. The hcpl's director, Cindy Hewitt, claimed that
there was never an intention to target the LGBTQ community, but the incident exposed
to the need for clarity and communication regarding book reviews in the library. The
incident highlights the importance of supporting libraries diversity and includes The story was published on
al dot com on October eighth, twenty twenty three. So, thinking about
this story, I'd love to hear everybody's opinion about it. Why don't we
start with Kelly, Oh, okay, I wasn't prepared for we could go
to Phoebe. Actually, if yeah, yeah, go ahead, the one
we've passed, the Phoebe sounds good. Well, people don't realize that banning
books is not really a thing that works in this day and age. People
are aware that, you know, you can buy books, you can borrow
books from friends. That's still a thing. You can go to other libraries.
So if this one library decides to go to band book X, go
to a different library. I mean, we're not in the eighteen fifties,
where you know, paper and bookbinding are technologies that are difficult to get a
skilled workforce to create. I mean, we've got kindle readers, we've got
audio books. I mean, we've got a whole plethora of things where you
can obtain books in multiple formats and you don't have to go down to a
library to go and get your your book of choice. I mean, in
Britain in the nineteen fifties, we decided that we were going to ban some
books. France, on the other hand, decided it wasn't going to bother
So you know what loads of people used to do. You got a ferry
at New Haven, get off the ferry at Diepp, walk to a bookshop,
buy it, put it in a brown paper bag. Women would slip
it in their handbags and then sail back to New Haven from deep with the
book. I mean, you can't suppress these things. I mean there's a
scene in The Man in the High Castle where they had the restricted texts,
which is things like Brave New World by Audience Huxley and stuff like that in
a locked room in like a prison cell type thing where you need permission from
Tokyo to go and get access to these books. And it's just like how
far down the rabbit hole of lunacy we're were going to go? You flagged
a book because it's got the word game it what makes we're going to TV
media. We ban the Finstone because the ending theme says you're going to have
a gay o time Jonathan Ugh oh book anyway. No, the list wasn't
trying to discriminate against LGBTQ people, were they The HCPL should really be ashamed
of themselves. It never crossed their minds when they were using a search program
that was programmed to search for gay in book titles in order to put them
in a booth in the back, in the corner, in the dark,
where they thought that that kind of filthy porno that might mention queer people in
kids books belong. Let's let kids learn about gender and sex on the street
or the schoolyard, the best place for any education, according to my ex
brother in law. But bureautic, bureaucratic response of it was never the intention?
Whose intention? Where did this list come from? Those words ring a
little hollow when you find out that there was this list was produced by a
right wing group and that they were complain about LGBTQA or woke culture and black
history. What happened is they put on a book list and they got caught.
The library was given a list from these people, and it was reviewing
it in doing what librarians do, review books to see if they're appropriate for
their library. That's what librarians do. It would not be a good book
for a library, kind of against Library Association's stance on diversity, and I'll
read it here. The library profession recognizes the critical need for access to library
information and resources, services and technologies by all people, especially those who may
experience language or literacy related barrier, economic distress, cultural or social isolation,
physical or attitudinal barriers, racism, discrimination on the basis of appearance, ethnicity,
immigrant status, religious background, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression,
or barriers to equal education, employment, and housing. The problem is
this group wants to ban the ALA as well or have their libraries withdraw from
the ALA because of this statement. So I can't say that Alabama appears like
but okay, they're beginning to look a lot like Florida. So where as
you go, So you better be on your guard your vocab is and charts,
and I don't say gay in school, Kelly, take this before I
start singing game. You know, John, I hate to do this,
but you know what, this book wasn't on a list from a conservative group.
It was a preemptive strike by the library. Executive director of the Library,
Cindy Hewitt, asked the managers of each individual branch of the library to
use keywords to search for books that might be in their branch and to review
those books. And because one of the keywords was gay, this this book
did pop up on one of the lists, so it's not it was.
It was basically the library's own list. But it does go to show you
how out of hand something like this can get. The library director. Executive
Director Cindy Hewitt did say the book was going nowhere. It is not being
taken off the shelf, it's not being moved anywhere, and she has no
plans to remove it from the library. There was a great partial quote by
one of the library managers in the article who said that it was cosmically ironic
that this situation escalated during Banned Book Week. So I thought I'd look into
like banned book requests, And according to the American Library Association, there were
one thousand, two hundred and sixty nine individual requests to banned books in twenty
twenty two, nearly double the seven hundred and twenty nine from the year before.
Many of the requests included multiple titles, and a total of two thousand,
five hundred and seventy one individual books were challenged, up from eighteen hundred
and fifty eight titles in twenty twenty one. So this is like an expanding
problem. And the vast majority of these titles, like eighty five percent of
them involved members of the LGBT community or people of color, so there is
definitely a bias here and nearly forty percent of the request to ban a book
were part of a list of one hundred or more books in the same request.
It's not some little thing started by a couple of crazy moms at your
school. This is an organized attempt by a very few amount of people to
squash information that a small grid that the same small group of people have been
deemed have deemed unfit for your kids. Not theirs, but your kids.
They want to put their ideals on way you raise your children, and it's
absolutely wrong, Cross Examiner. You want to pick it up from there,
sure, absolutely, I thought, since we are, I totally agree with
you seeing an exponential rise in the actions of these fringe groups to try to
ban books. Moms for Liberty is the main one right now, right that
was started by Florida school officials, three of them. One of them left
when they saw where this was going, but the two are still pushing and
now they have chapters in every state, most counties. Side note but one
up and I think it was an Illinois published a quote from Hitler on their
newsletter. It wasn't an accidental quote. It was literally, he who controls
the youth controls the future, and they printed under it dash Adolf Hitler.
So these are the people that are trying to ban our books. So I
thought for my segment at least first, there's so many things to talk about
here. There's legal issues, there's the lies that Hewittt is telling. I
agree with your analysis there, Kelly, but I think there's some lies that
we can catchure in and then we can look at some modern trends. But
I'm just going to stick for now because I don't want to hog the mic
with just a quick review of what is the law here? Right, No
reporters ever really come out and say, what is the law? What are
we arguing about here? Why can these groups do what they're doing. So
there's three main cases that we have to go over, and we have to
keep in mind that what's at play here is the First Amendment. Right.
The library is a government forum that is selecting speech and at some point banning
that speech once they have it in their collection. So there's a tension between
collection selectivity my library collection, and neutral treatment of speech. So the courts
have had only three cases that have come close to addressing this, and none
of them are definitive. There is no settled law on how to handle these
things. The earliest was called a case called Brown versus Louisiana, very similarly
named to Brown versus Board of Education, about the same thing. Louisiana would
give people library cards, and back then, this was nineteen sixty six,
if you were black, they would stamp the word Negro on it. And
you were allowed to use the blue bookmobile, but not the red bookmobile,
and you couldn't go into the branches, so you had one bookmobile, and
the courts. That was the first time the court said, wait a second,
First Amendment, equal protection all applies to public libraries. That's a no
no. And then we jump forward to nineteen eighty two, which is the
one that's relevant to this case, which is Board of Education versus Pico,
where a board at a school library said that they wanted to ban certain list
of books. There was about nine of them because they were anti American,
anti Christian, and anti Semitic and just playing filthy. So notice how they
steak in that anti Christian as if that's the job of the government. And
there the courts held that they the reason that the school was banning these was
unconstitutional. It violated the First Amendment and Finally, the America Library Association,
I think it was Jonathan who mentioned the ALA and how the Alabama fringe group
wants to have their library withdraw from the ALA. ALA sued the United States
government back in two thousand and three because they passed a law that said,
you can get funding for your libraries, but only if you install these filters
that will filter out certain information, and the ALA stood up to the government
and said, you can't do that. They actually lost that case, but
it was only because the government said, well, if an adult requests that
this filter be removed, you can let them do that, so you can
have unfiltered information. So those that's it, none of them have spoken,
have printed, have formulated any sort of rule. They just say, well,
in this particular case, you can't do that. In that particular case,
you can't do that. So we really need some good cases to go
before the court to really give us a good set of rules here. Generally,
the courts will say, once a book is in the collection, removing
it becomes a lot harder. That act becomes much more examinable or reviewable by
the courts as a First Amendment problem, and that's what we have here.
So I have a lot more to talk to talk about here on the lies
of Cindy Hewett that we could review, but I thought i'd check in with
the rest of you, like Phoebe, do you have anything else to observe
her? See you bring up the law and you remind me of the provision
of the Patriot Act which said that your library records can be searched, that
you can go and search your library records. And if that isn't one of
the biggest invasions, if your freedom of speed, what books you're taking out
of the library, what books you're reading in your own home, woud you
have taken from a public space funded by public money, and the government saying
that the FBI have the right to go and invade that most precious sanctity of
what's going on in your mind, what information you're putting in your mind,
is something really quite dangerous. And it showed the absurdity of governments and organizations
at all levels trying their very best to regulate libraries in a way which seems
to get to the level of absurdity. Because you used to have the piece
of paper that they'd put up on the side that says that this library has
not been asked for a record's request by the Department of Home led Security.
They couldn't say they had, but they could say they hadn't. And if
that piece of paper disappeared, then they were getting around the lawd because they
weren't telling people they were. But they also weren't any people. They weren't.
Yeah, they put at the bottom of that sign they said, keep
an eye on this sign. Yes, those librarians were sassy. Yeah,
keep an eye on this sign. If this sign disappears, keep an eye
watched this space and things like that, and it goes to show that there
is a very odd relationship that people seem to have with the libraries and library
books. I mean, I remember there was a library that tried to ban
Fahrenheit four fifty one, which is a book about banning books for crime out
cloud. If that doesn't strike you as irony of ironies here we need to
stop what I see as these Neanderthals with narrow minds trying to make us all
into the and of tours with narrow minds again, because this is where these
library bands end up, and we end up with these absurd situations where you
have people deciding what is and is not publicly decent, publicly moral, and
what other people should be putting into their own brain. And I can't see
it as anything other than the least American thing you would ever want to do
is to pry open the trap door of somebody's brain, pee your head in
and go, oh I don't like that. Oh I like that. Oh
you're fine, because that's where it ends up with this nonsense, because you're
saying you can't put this bit of information in, You've got to take this
bit of information in, or you looked at that bit of information, and
it just all spirals out of all control, and it just gets to the
point where it hurts my head ironically, and I just go, why are
we bothering worrying about the little thing? And I'll tell you why, because
if you're worrying about the little things and you push back on the little things,
you stop the America's hop sailing past you when they get away with the
big things. John, I just don't really have an awful lot more to
say about this. I read that somewhere Gilly that that list was provided to
the the the library group there that has I guess ten libraries in its thing
that there was a list provided to them by a group, and I've been
trying to find where it is and can't manage to do that. So I'm
going to retract that statement. But I wasn't trying to get down on you,
John, I was just trying to make you know, get Oh,
that's fine. No, I know what you're trying to do. That's fine.
I'm good with it. But I don't really have to give you a
big electronic cug buddy. I have some information along those lines. If you
like, sure, that'd be fun. But go ahead. Okay. So
the organization you're talking about is an organization called clean Up Alabama. They are
the ones who said we need to withdraw from the alawill. It's point two
of their mission statement. Point two of their mission statements says that we have
to that Alabama should withdraw from the hard left ALA. So that takes it
away from protecting kids from books about sex and puts it into Now, this
is a political suppression of information. And Cindy Hewitt truly did say, Okay,
well, yes, we are aware of Cleanup Alabama. We know they're
coming. Here's where we can we can see what's happening. They publish Clean
Up Alabama. If you go to their website, they have a list of
here's all the books we want banned. So that was out there. So
whether or not Cindy Hewitt admits to it, that list was out there,
they do say that, Hey, we knew this was coming, so we
decided to preemptively start reviewing books. So that's a very sneaky way to say.
No, we didn't use their list at all. It was our own
list. But why were they doing it because of this list? So I
think you're kind of both right on that one. Cindy, if you look
at the record in the story and you look at what she's done, is
not trustworthy. She said, Oh, I only asked my staff to search
for four terms sexuality, gender, sex, and dating. Yet Alex kim
Young, a circulation manager at Madison Branch, said no, this was not
just a mandate of those terms. There were many more turns lesbian, gay,
transgender, and it wasn't just a review. We were told to move
the books, so I think we should can. I haven't seen that Alabama
has followed up on this, but I think that there was a lot of
lying double toot going on the al dot com who ran the story did do
a good analysis and they reviewed all of the books that were affected. They
found that ninety one percent of those titles out of two hundred and thirty three
books, had the words lesbian, gay, transgender, gender identity, or
gender nonconforming in the subject tender. What are the odds that, if you're
trying to protect kids from general sexual information, that ninety one percent of the
books are affected have those keywords in them. Cindy Hewittt is not to be
trusted, She said, this was a miscommunication problem with my you know,
with our program here. So we go back to the old story. Well,
either your lying or your entire staff are incompetent. Which one is it?
So that's the question I would want to ask her. I want to
end this on a quote from ALA President Lesa Paleo Lozada. Everyday, professional
librarians sit down with parents that thoughtfully determine what reading material is best suited for
their child's needs. Now, many library workers face threats to their employment,
their personal safety, their lives, and in some cases, threats of prosecution
for providing books to youth they and their parents want to read. What kind
of world are we living in when librarians become the frontline troops, almost literally,
in a culture war. I get that they do, and they should
stand up for freedom and of information. I'm all tongue types. I'm really
emotional about this, but where in a librarian's job description is putting their lives
on the line at I'm really pissed off about this, and it's something we
should all be pissed off at and be fighting back against.