It's Only Censorship When They Do It

This post from last week brought this comment from SafeLibraries:

I support your efforts to oppose violations of rights. However, what has been reported by most sources is not what the actual facts are. For a little balance, take a look at what I wrote, after actually speaking with Gail Sweet, at "Et tu, Mary Minow? Then Fall, Gail Sweet!"

It wouldn't hurt to take a peek at this:

WILL UNWOUND #193: “Why do Librarians Hate Conservatives?” by Will Manley. (Or this by the same recognized library expert.)

I've been avoiding this one. Not that it's hard, not that I'm stumped for a response, simply that I'm tired to death of hysterical, dishonest rants against godless liberals and how they're the ones who are really trying to censor everything.  I get fed up, to be quite frank about it.  However, since I feel committed to a response, I am going to hit some of the most egregious misrepresentations in the posts SafeLibraries (hereinafter "S/L") recommended.

First, the post from the SafeLibraries blog.  The second sentence of the second paragraph starts to indicate the direction in which this is going:

Gail Sweet is the library director of the Burlington County Library System.  She removed a book from her library for failure to meet its book selection policy—a picture from the book is included at right.  For this she has been misrepresented in the media, e.g., "NJ Library, Citing Child Pornography, Removes GLBT Book," by Lauren Barack, School Library Journal, 27 July 2010, and criticized on partisan blogs—what a sin it is to be "active in the tea party movement"—e.g., "NJ Library Removes LGBT Book, Calling It 'Child Pornography,'" by Jim Burroway, Box Turtle Bulletin, 28 July 2010.  The comments are particularly egregious.

OK, first -- she removed a book from the collection for failing to meet the selection policy.  My question is, if it didn't meet the selection criteria, why was it in the collection?  Next question, if the book had been placed in the collection properly, why didn't Sweet follow the regular procedures to have it removed?

Next we have this:  "'[D]irect calls to Sweet were not returned.'  So you go ahead and publish false information uncritically?"  S/L is trying to make this look like a smear campaign against Gail Sweet, and this seems like the opening salvo:  there's no evidence that the information published was false, only S/L's say-so, which I regard as less than reliable.  My take is simply that Sweet had an opportunity to defend her actions and chose not to.  There may be any number of reasons for that, one of which may be that her actions are indefensible.

S/L makes great capital out of the "child pornography" quote and how it was "shorthand" between colleagues.  What S/L doesn't give is the context, which we can get from this story in the Courier-Post:

The county system's decision to remove "Revolutionary Voices," an anthology of first-person works by gay youths, was made quietly in the spring. But it's now stirring an online furor with the release of e-mails on the issue by the county's library director, Gail Sweet.

"How can we grab the books so that they never, ever get back into circulation?" Sweet asked in one e-mail to a library employee. "Copies need to totally disappear (as in not a good idea to send copies to the book sale)."

And when another librarian asked why the award-winning book was being removed, Sweet responded with two words: "Child pornography."

One could take the "child pornography" comment as a joke, until one sees the rest of the story.

I'm going to let the next two paragraphs speak for themselves before I comment:

Gail Sweet applied the library's selection policy initially due to the high school issue and before any patron complained.  This frees the library from the need to use the materials reconsideration policy designed for patrons.  I note the ALA article did report some accurate information that corroborates my findings based on my discussion with Gail Sweet, namely, "We were aware of the challenge at Rancocas Valley High School and took a look at the book…."  In other words, she was doing her job the taxpayers pay her to do.  This is partly why Gail Sweet is a model library director.

Everyone seeking to reverse the decision, on the irrelevant issue of homosexuality by the way, is complaining she should not have applied the selection policy and instead should have followed the policy designed for patrons.  What a double standard.  When people seek to add ex-gay books to the public library, in others words books that explain how to leave homosexuality, patron input is ignored and the selection policy is used to weed out such books, not the patron policy.  Read the Annoyed Librarian on how selection is used to censor certain materials sought by "conservative Christians."  Gail Sweet is guilty of refusing to follow a double standard that is used nationwide to block ex-gay material from public libraries without even a whimper from the national groups who are suddenly strident in Burlington County.

On the woman who complained about the book in the high school:

The book was pulled from the county library and from the library at Rancocas Valley Regional High School in Mount Holly after objections from Beverly Marinelli, a Lumberton woman and a member of the 9/12 Project, a conservative group founded by Fox News Channel pundit Glenn Beck.

OK, let's take this in order:

1: Sweet was trying to do this on the down-low and got caught. It's a pattern that we've seen again and again, as witness this comment from Patricia Tumulty of the New Jersey Library Association:

About 500 book challenges are reported annually to the American Library Association, said Angela Maycock, who oversees the group's Office for Intellectual Freedom.

In most cases, the book is retained, she said. But Maycock said libraries often do not publicize a book's removal.

"The reason they get removed is it's done under cover of darkness," she said. "When public attention is brought to the situation, that's when the books remain on the shelves." (My emphasis)

2: Homosexuality is not, as S/L claims, irrelevant to this case, it is the motivation for the book's removal.

3: The "ex-gay" double-standard: Frankly, I think it is perfectly legitimate to resist the inclusion of books that present junk science and junk theology and prescribe dangerous and often harmful therapies under the supervision of perverts, with a strong dose of disapproval, to kids who may very likely be vulnerable.

This seems to be an appropriate place to note the state library association's statement:

Patricia Tumulty, president of the New Jersey Library Association, did not address the county library's action directly, saying it was not clear how the removal took effect.

But she noted her group had issued a statement after the Rancocas Valley decision, saying books should not be removed "because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval."

"Libraries do not discriminate against unpopular or controversial ideas," it said. "To the contrary, they select resources so that the library collection meets the needs of everyone in the community it serves."

S/L insists that everyone involved (except, of course, S/L, Gail Sweet, and Beverly Marinelli) is misrepresenting events, but does not manage to support that contention in any way. (Sorry, S/L, mere assertion doesn't work here.)

I do agree that children do need to be protected and their reading should be supervised. I do not agree that some Beck-worshipper is the person who should decide what everyone's children have access to. Maybe S/L should think about the appropriate role of parents in all of this, in determining what their own children will have their permission to read. Just maybe we can all figure out that parents should stop ducking their responsibilities.

I'm not going to bother with the two posts from Will Manley, which you can read yourselves if you follow the links. The first is a comment from one of Manley's readers along the general lines of "I was a liberal, but I was saved!" (See "ex-gay" above.) The second is a straw man argument based on the idea that the ALA does the Devil's work.

(A Note: S/L takes an opportunity to denigrate Box Turtle Bulletin, which I have found to be a reliable online source for issues of gay civil rights. Jim Burroway is an extraordinarily thorough and careful writer and is always ready to admit a mistake -- which he seldom has to do. His two posts on this controversy are here and here. After comparing his analysis with S/L's -- well, you can make your own decision on who to believe. As for the comments that S/L objects to: y'know, comments on blogs are comments from just anybody. Get over it.)