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we love hate mail. it gives us the chance to explain ourselves to people who may have been misled about what we do. below is an actual hate mail and our actual response . please read our response as it explains a lot.
we believe almost all librarians want to do the right thing, so when we respond as shown, we hope to create "learning librarians," librarians willing to think with an open mind and listen to an information source outside the ala's so-called "office for intellectual freedom." remember, " those who cry 'censorship!' the loudest who are the ones trying to stifle speech and force their moral world-view on others ."
from: [name withheld]
date: mar 16, 2006 9:30 pm
subject: apalling
you people have no idea what librarians do or even what libraries are for. what on earth is a "safe" library? one in which only your beliefs are adhered to?
do you honestly believe that libraries should be responsible for "protecting" your children? librarians such as myself are not your children's parents. you are. stop making it everyone else's responsibility to shield/guide/instill values in your children. do this job yourself instead of injecting your religious and moral beliefs into public institutions that are supposed to serve a variety of patrons and needs. not everyone is christian. not everyone is heterosexual. no one is arguing that a library should only include resources on islam or only offer sexual materials. librarians are not asking that the reference section be replaced by the lesbian terrorist section. so why do you insist that libraries remove anything that you don't agree with and include only those materials you find acceptable? who are you to judge what is inappropriate for everyone? when you remove something from the library, it is not just your child who does not have access to this material. it is every person who walks through those doors. as much as you may hate to admit it, your children are not the center of the universe.
if you intend to mold your children into believers of your ideology, you can do this without interfering with this country's schools and libraries. you can discuss your beliefs with your children and serve as models for their behavior. if libraries scare you, talk to your children about them. rather than limit the institution's holdings, limit your child's contact with those holdings if you care so much about it.
perhaps many of you are not librarians. you do not realize that librarianship is filled with many tasks. do you even know that most of the people you think are librarians (the people who check your books out to you) are clerks, not librarians in the true sense of the word? many of these people are volunteers or part-time employees. they assume these thankless roles because they love books or love their communities, and while many of them work hard, they lack advanced degrees and critical training in collection management, cataloging, and reference. if you think that these individuals should monitor what your children get their hands on, they will be the first ones to tell you that you are sorely mistaken. please do some research about librarianship before you discuss "librarians" at length.
patron interaction is a main part of a librarian's job, but we are not social workers. we are not child psychologists. or counselors. we should not be asked to be held accountable for the moral welfare of your children. if you think that we have the authority to advance your family's teachings, please understand that libraries are made up of dozens, hundreds, even thousands of families. if we're responsible for promoting one's morality, we're responsible for another's. and another's. and another's. and not everyone believes what you do. just as i would not remove an author i might not like from the shelf, i would not tell your child what to do. and that is what you are asking of us.
and why are you so obsessed with playboy? your site claims that playboy "has been used in the sexual entrapment of children." so has candy. are you seeking to bar candy sales, too?
dear ms. [university librarian student],
thank you for contacting safelibraries.org. we will attempt to address your concerns and we will be happy to respond to any future questions.
here's the big picture. the ala is a venerable organization in the american landscape. the ala used to encourage librarians who truly love and care about their patrons, particularly children. if a child somehow obtained an inappropriate book, the librarians could be trusted to steer the child right.
then, sometime around the 60's, the ala came under the influence of the aclu. the aclu is an organization whose stated goal is the destruction of the united states i? 1/2 in the words of the aclu's founder, "i am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. i seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. communism is the goal." the sexualization of children is one of the tools used by the aclu to effectuate its founders words.
no longer would librarians, at least those guided by the acluified ala, protect children from inappropriate material. the ala decided sua sponte to change a librarian's relationship with children to one of providing any information at all, no matter how inappropriate. the so-called "library bill of rights" was changed to add the word "age" to make this clear to ala librarians. this is how the ala chose to implement the aclu goals. librarians who did not toe the ala line were subject to various levels of professional pressure to the point where today many librarians are literally afraid of the ala.
people soon learned their children were in danger in public libraries and numerous laws were written, but all were found unconstitutional until cipa come along. each time the ala was the lead organization trying to prevent the application of laws intended to protect children. then in 2003, us v. ala became a stinging defeat of the ala's goals of sexualizing children. for example, the court said, "the interest in protecting young library users from material inappropriate for minors is legitimate, and even compelling, as all members of the court appear to agree." to this very day, however, the ala, ever subservient to the aclu's and now the ala's goal to sexualize children, counsels libraries on how to make end runs around this law.
to be clear, most librarians and perhaps even most ala librarians do not think it appropriate to sexualize children. but they are not running the ala. judith krug is. for decades as the head of the office for intellectual freedom, mrs. krug, formerly of the aclu, has ensured the ala's policy to sexualize children is carried out as effectively as possible. mrs. krug even said that parents who care get their children playboy magazine.
the relationship between the ala and the playboy company is extremely close, but i will not discuss that here.
now at this time in history, the ala is in a position where it is advising libraries how to make end runs around the law. the ala provides online guidance to librarians on how to do this. such guidance includes how to rephrase statements to make them more palatable to the public and elected officials. the ala believes, rightly, that if they can fool people into thinking like the ala, those people will act to implement ala policy. indeed this is a propaganda technique called "conversion."
safelibraries.org is trying to educate the public about the truth. not safelibraries' truth, not your truth, not anyone's truth. we are advising people to get educated about us v. ala, even board of education v. pico. we think if people actually read those cases, they will be able to see for themselves that the ala is wrong and by how much. then, on their own, they can begin to see through the ala propaganda. it is propaganda, for example, to reargue in local communities issues that have already been asked and answered by the us supreme court as if they never where raised in the case the ala itself lost. censorship is a favorite issue used by the ala to scare the public. you would think the ala would know better. it does, but being guided by the law and communities interests does not fit with the goal of sexualizing children.
by way of example of sexualizing children, look at the 2006 michael l. printz award for the best "young adult" literature. right off the bat, the ala defines 12 year olds who are not yet even teenagers as adults. now the award winner, "looking for alaska" by john green, deemed to be the very best book of 2006 for children as young as twelve, contains hard core p*rnographic scenes, let alone the 1.3 inappropriate words or phrases per page for 12 year olds. with this award, the ala has ensured the widest possible distribution of this book for years. for years, 12 year olds will be reading sexually inappropriate matter. they may act out on what they read, and they may be physically and/or mentally damaged for life, and the ala will have satisfied its goal to sexualize children so as to further the aclu's overall goals as stated by its founder.
any arguments directed at safelibraries itself are irrelevant and are logically fallacious and ad hominem in nature. what we think or feel is irrelevant. we do not want to instill our values into children, rather we want the ala to stop instilling its lack of values into children, particularly in light of us v. ala. we are attempting to advise people on how to think for themselves. the more they think for themselves, the less influence the ala can have. the more we are successful in our efforts, the more the ala acolytes will attempt any argument to convince people not to give us any weight.
safelibraries is not christian, not against pornography, not against homosexuality, takes no position as to any criminals involved with molesting or raping children, is not in favor of censorship, and is not any other way the ala may characterize us. we are only advising people about existing facts and existing law. almost every statement we make is backed up with a link to the source material from whence it came. fortunately for us, the ala has become so brazen in sexualizing children that its own actions and the words of its leaders doom them independently of what we might say. we merely gather the outrageous ala information into one spot so the sunshine can brighten the dark efforts of the ala to sexualize our children.
we also point out from time to time that librarians themselves decided to claim they are not responsible for children. they did this to further the goal to sexualize children. we point out that librarians have, by themselves, decided this. if people blindly follow this lead, and many do right now, librarians will be the only government employees having absolutely no responsibilities toward children. nice try but not everyone is fooled.
we hope this has helped you to understand safelibraries and its goal of educating people to think for themselves instead of blindly carrying out ala policy to sexualize children. please write again should you have further concerns.
ps: the * appears in p*rn only to bypass email filters. ironic, isn't it?
