Let's start off with this clip from Rachel Maddow:
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Add in the book challenges in libraries -- school and public -- every year, most of which go unreported. There seems to be quite a cottage industry in this area, as a matter of fact, with librarians making pre-emptive strikes -- or trying to until they get caught.
What this reveals is an ugly mindset, antithetical to everything that America stands for -- these people (meaning the so-called "conservatives" who are trying not only to censor ideas but to eradicate them) are not content with avoiding things they object to, or forbidding their children to experience them, but insist that no one, child or adult, may have access to them.
These are extremists, and one finds a similar mindset on the extreme left. Actually, it needn't even be that extreme. They won't burn books, but they'll try to silence those who aren't politically correct enough. I call it the "What will the neighbors think?" syndrome: it's those who want to eliminate the drag queens, leather folk and nearly naked dancers from Gay Pride parades, for example, so that we'll be more "acceptable." Thankfully, their voices seem to be fading, but I had occasion to pose this question in a comment thread recently: "Acceptable" on whose terms -- how much of yourself are you willing to give up to be tolerated?
But I digress.
Granted, those who physically attacked works of art are seriously disturbed people, but that disturbance has to have an anchor point. For them, that anchor is the same attitude that infects people like Tony Perkins, Maggie Gallagher, Peter Sprigg, Peter LaBarbera, and their ilk.
Why do you suppose they get all the air-time?
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