Burning Books

None take umbrage so quickly at the threat of denying books to the masses than the American left and their legal arm, the ACLU. They do have limits in their pursuit of total access, such as their attachment to the totally oxymoronic “Fairness Doctrine” for broadcasting, but when it comes to libraries and materials that might support the “unusual” in life-styles or the destructive in political theory, they are adamantly in favor of the First Amendment.

That’s why it was predictable when it was acknowledged that Sarah Palin was a practicing Christian serving as mayor in a small town that they would dig into supposed transgressions of that nebulous line between church and state. They announced that they had a most egregious example of abuse of power. She demanded, they alleged, that the town librarian ban books then fired her when she resisted. Sounds like reasonable outrage to me.

But, the facts did not support that allegation at all. First, the accusation crumbled when the list of books to be banned post-dated the request for banning. Damnably hard to ban a book that isn’t yet a book. Then it was confirmed that she didn’t ask to ban anything. She merely exercised her supervisory responsibility over the library and inquired about how such requests are handled. No smoking gun there. Finally, she didn’t relieve the librarian in relation to that incident, but simply in a routine change of administration policy exercised by all government executives requested the resignation of all cabinet level officials in the city government. She rehired the librarian immediately. Not a thing there at all.

Here’s a detailed and related account:

What Library Boards Do

I had the privilege of serving for ten years on the seven member board of trustees of the Pikes Peak Library District which serves Colorado Springs and the surrounding community. For three of those years I was board president. The district was an independent library district with its own taxing authority and not a part of city or county government. We had 14 branches, an annual budget just under $20 million, 150 employees and more than one million items in our collection.

You can be certain that we dealt with requests for removal of books from the collection. We had a clear policy of community responsiveness and a specified review procedure. We also found that we never removed any item from the collection except for issues of durability (shoddy materials, binding or failure to stand up to library handling) or clearly identifiable factual errors in non-fiction works. We were not the library arm of Focus on the Family, but you can be certain that they attended board meetings quite often.

During my tenure we lost our executive director—the library professional who administered the entire system. Pikes Peak has a tradition of being a stepping stone on the career path of exceptional library directors. While I was there we saw directors leave to take over San Francisco, Boston and Columbus OH districts. I served on the national search committee to select a replacement director.

We very clearly asked each and every candidate to annunciate their policy and their ideological position on removal of challenged materials. Every single one! We would have been remiss had we failed to do so. We were adamantly against denial of access to adults of anything published based on religious belief or moral judgments. We were strongly supportive of safeguarding children, but expected parental involvement in that process. We didn’t burn books. But we also did not spell that position out to potential directors and thereby risk biasing their response to interview questions. We asked about book banning and we needed to do that.

It seems very clear to this experienced library trustee that Mayor Palin was doing exactly the right thing.