Idaho Republicans have taken a different tack in their approach to limit access to books they don’t like. They now require the ‘bad’ books in library to be sequestered into a special section that requires special permission to access, and that requires children to be accompanied by an adult. They have to sign in every time they enter the Forbidden Room, so they’ve got a record of who wants to access the naughty books. One woman named Carly took her 11 year old child into the Den of Sin to get a specific book.
Carly explains, “The sign says that if you are under 18, you’re not allowed up there unless you have an unrestricted library card or your parent that is over 18 signs an affidavit for you.” So Carly shows her ID and her daughter’s library card, thinking she’s in the clear. But the librarians still don’t allow her to enter the adult section.
“But no, why don’t they let me? Because I’m holding a baby, my 1-year-old.” Yep, you read that right. Even a literal baby now needs the proper documents to be in Carly’s library. “They said that because I had a baby there (who can’t read), I’m not allowed in the library with her unless she has a library card or I signed an affidavit. So me and Daphne just watched from the edge while Scarlett goes in to find her book. The librarian ended up helping her.” Carly’s clear in her video that she doesn’t blame the librarians, saying, “They were being so nice and patient… I felt like the librarians are sick of it. They feel so bad turning kids away from going into the library.”
The wicked book? The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien.
This is a lovely example of how Republicans are weird — this is a silly law against a non-existent problem promoted by lawmakers who are completely out of touch with their constituency.
Most Idahoans — 69% — trust library staff with book selection, while 23% of Idahoans do not, according to this year’s Idaho Public Policy Survey. More than half of Idaho librarians are considering leaving library work as a result of library-related legislation, according to an informal survey conducted by the Idaho Library Association.
This is not new. When I was a young kid, my local library put all the science books in an adult section and would shoo kids away if they tried to enter — I had to call my parents to get permission to read books about dinosaurs. By the time I was in high school, they’d so thoroughly loosened that stupid policy to the point that they openly displayed copies of Playboy on the periodicals rack. I wasn’t interested in Playboy, but much appreciated free access to all the other books in the library.
This is about as much as what books they want people (children) to read, then the ones they don’t want you to read. It is all about mind control through indoctrination. Make people narrow minded as possible with the focus on the God. And of course, they want to decide which stories about God are good for you. This is the end game.
Sequestering those “bad” books will require a neon sign above and entrance of hanging strings of beads, proctored by an adult school hall monitor. That would cost public funds, while a Nazi-style book burning is much cheaper.
Isn’t this locking books away and limiting access what many libraries did in xtian terrorist run countries (and other countries, too) for centuries? Welcome to the new Dark Ages,
I had the same experience as a 9 year old at my local library. My father had to sign out a dinosaur encyclopedia for me because it was in the adult section. This was well before dinosaurs were cool. It fired up an interest in palaeontology and geology which I went on to study at uni. My major interest was in fossil corals because dinosaurs were few and far between and I had a job that allowed me to study them. However I was the resident go-to for vertebrate fossils because I collected them from limestone breccias in an old quarry I used to visit every few months. Not many spectacular finds though just a couple of megafaunal kangaroo jaws which went straight to a museum.
What the GOP is ignoring is the fact that their are other ways to access information and photos than just libraries.
This is after all, 2024.
The internet has been invented and is ubiquitous.
In fact, most libraries have banks of internet computers and they are heavily used.
And, most people carry around an internet capable device called a cell phone, including children.
To take one example, you can find more porn (whatever that is, what is porn is subjective) on the internet in 30 seconds than you could find in a library with a week of searching.
The GOP is pretending to fix a nonexistent problem while ignoring the fact that what they are doing isn’t going to work in an era of widespread internet access.
Same for me as for #4 Garydargan. I was 9, I had read every non-fiction book in the children’s section, and most of the fiction, so my parents had to get library permission for me to check out “adult” books. This was nearly 70 years ago. What did I read? More science.
Our public library, which is good, widely popular, and I go to often, has a bank of internet computers. This is true of all libraries these days.
When they first got the internet computers about 20 years ago, the local fundie xians tried to get the library to prohibit children from accessing them. By going to the city council.
The library refused.
They pointed out that they were a library, not a babysitting service.
It was the parent’s responsibility to raise their children, not the library’s.
What they did was set up a few computers with Net Nanny software for children. This is software that supposedly makes the internet safe for children.
No one ever used them.
Except me.
Since they were always open, and I didn’t care, I would use them when the library was busy.
raven@5– Didn’t know there was a Dewey decimal code for porn :-)
I’m sure many of you know this, but…
Library of Congress classification (which is used by many academic and special libraries) is different from Dewey Decimal in that there’s a letter code at the beginning of the number that specifies what general subject the book is. For example, books about music begin with “ML”, sports is “GV”, photography “TR” and so on and so forth.
Books about Christianity? You can find them under (chuckle) “BS”.
The biggest difference between Tolkein and the Bible is that the Lord of the Rings doesn’t have sex in it.
The Idaho legislature probably has 42 kids who they want to go play with the wild bears.
They SAY they want freedom, but they clearly don’t.
In my small-town Canadian library in the late 1960s, the only book they wouldn’t let me check out was “Mein Kampf”.
I can’t remember there ever was any restricted adult areas in our libraries. I did have to get permission for a book on pyrotechnics, but that’s about it.
At my local library’s Sight & Sounds department, I was able to find both Pretty Baby and The Tin Drum unedited. They were on the shelves for anyone to pick up. If explicit films aren’t sectioned off, it goes without saying books are sectioned by subject matter rather than “appropriateness” to youngsters.
This form of censorship is completely foreign to me despite occurring in the sane country.
*Same country. “Sane” is the last word I’d use to describe the US generally.
It would be interesting to see what books the wannabe book banners have in their homes. Lots of kids get their first exposure to “adult material” from books in their own homes. Like lots of people in the ’70s my parents received Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and reading from a young age I started reading those probably when I was 7 or so. The abridging process took out any explicit sex and other things, but I was still a kid reading adult books. Not that my parents had any problems with me reading them.
Good luck getting rid of them if you have a bunch sitting in a box. No one is interested in buying then,
So they put all the bad stuff where we know to look?
Need I mention that this is just christians hauling up the stupid roger? When I was a kid I learned fhat there were banned books and subsequently obtained Lady Chatterly’s Lover (boring but OK romance, one star) then De Sade’s Justine (more like it but weird) and from there to The Anarchist’s cookbook (zero stars, mistakes in the recipes, reads like written by a stoned hippie)
That was my first and far from last encounter with an intelligence element called “The Targeting Problem” – if you make your communications obvious then you are subject to endpoint attack. If you conceal them, then (total communications) – (obvious communications) is your target priority. If I had a catalog of books and movies, and was able to do a join with what the library has, the juicy stuff falls right out and you go to the circulation desk and request Kropotkin, Camus, and John Cleland and they give you Camus to make you go away, bwaaahaaahaaaa
Come to think of it we should get them to ban Jean Meslier. Voltaire would feel so vindicated.
I ran into a similar issue when we bought our first house in Oklahoma, near Tinker AFB, where my husband was assigned.
I decided to cook a steak dinner to celebrate. I drove to the local grocery store to buy ingredients and was searching all over for the “wine aisle”. The store employee gave me an odd look and told me to go to the liquor store next door.
I put the groceries in the car and once again hoisted my baby son on my hip to go to the next store.
I was shocked when I wasn’t even allowed in the door because I had a child with me.I had to call my husband to ask him to pick up a bottle of wine on-base before he came home.
Some states have been schizophrenic about liquor sales for a long time, and now many of the same states are branching out into books.
timgueguen@15
LOL. I read my first salacious book when I was 10 or so at the home of people for whom my mother was babysitting one evening. I looked through their bookshelves and found one called “The Happy Hooker”. I curled up on a comfy chair and began to read.
When my mother asked, I told her that I was reading a biography of a businesswoman that I had found on a bookshelf.
She chuckled and made some sort of comment about all of the younger women and girls reading the same books.
I had read the entire book and learned a lot by the time we went home that night!
The same sort of thing happened when “Love Story” came out a few years later. I bought the book through The Scholastic Book Club at school and had read it several times. When the movie came out, a boy asked me to go see it for a date.
My very religious Catholic aunt told my mother that it was inappropriate because the couple “lived in sin” and that God punished them with the woman’s death by cancer. Since the boy who had asked me out was Asian and not from a proper (white) family, it gave my mother a good excuse to forbid me from seeing him. I hid my book from her, and I still have it, over 50 years later!
Young people always find a way to get around adult rules!
Soon we’ll have kids hanging out outside libraries, waiting for a stranger who looks maybe cool enough to ask, “hey mister, will you check us out some books?”
#18 magistramarla
I grew up in Southern Arizona in the ’60s and I think one couldn’t buy wine in grocery stores there either. Of course I was more interested in the cereal and candy aisles in those days, so I could be wrong. But also, my family just didn’t associate wine with food much in those days. A single bottle of something cheap and sweet might be bought for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and everyone who wanted to could have a small taste, even us kids, but that was it. And using wine as an ingredient in a dish was simply unheard of until The French Chef became popular.
25 years ago I interviewed for a job at a small town Alberta library. I was asked a hypothetical question: What would you do if a 13 year old asked you for books about satanism? I answered that I would show them where to find them.
I got the job.
My late wife and I have/had an extensive library. We allowed our kids to read any books they wanted to. When they were very young, we deliberately put a few books on particularly high shelves. We didn’t forbid the kids to read those books, just made them a but of a problem to get down. One of those was “Gray’s Anatomy”. There was never any question of discouraging Tolkien. Quite the other way around.
Why on earth would Fellowship of the Ring be stuck in book jail??
@garydargan #4 I had sort of a similar experience in my school library in the 4th grade, but it was the librarian trying to get me to read something other than dinosaur booksm, because I think I’d cheacked out every one thye had and was starting to re-read them. She must have spoken to my teacher, because my teacher then suggested I read a different kind of book, and lent me her personal copy of ‘The Hobbit’ :-) My 4th grade teacher was a massive influence on me, looking back…
The only known example of library censorship I remember first hand, happened in grade school in the 1950s.
The school library got a new science book in. It was a human anatomy book illustrated by that famous artist who drew lots of blood vessels. Frank Netter.
It was divided into chapters, one chapter for each organ system, heart, urinary tract, digestive, lymphatic, etc..
There was one chapter on…the reproductive system. Which I read and looked at without much thought.
Weeks later, I looked at the book again.
Someone had taken a razor blade, cut out the chapter on the reproductive systems, and then glued the surrounding two pages together. So the book was missing that chapter.
Evidently someone had complained to the school authorities.
Even then, I thought this was dumb and I was in the third grade.
It’s just plumbing and everyone has plumbing.
And they will learn about it sooner or later, one way or another.
Six decades later, I still think this was mindless vandalism of a science book.
And I’m sure that the state of Idaho has come up with a similar solution.
Hide that book and make the kids get parental permission to access forbidden knowledge about how human bodies work.
So the Xtians made a nice clear list of “naughty” books for the kids to look up on the internet? How considerate! Most of the kids would never have dreamed of looking up a book otherwise…
brucej @24, I was also wondering that.
As was said, in Fellowship of the Ring there’s no sex, and there aren’t even any big battles or other explicit gruesome violence. Yes, there are orcs and a Balog, but no one is tortured or mutilated or burned at the stake.
I can only think that it’s the fundies who don’t let kids read any fantasy books or fairy tales, because “It’s the occult!” and will teach them false religions. (You know, like playing Dungeons and Dragons will make you a murderer and send you to hell.)
But I asked my sister, a Christian, about that and she said that LOtR is generally in favor, because it has showndowns between good and evil and good wins.
Do you think that they keep Snow White away from the kids? Cause it’s got magic in it.
One way to make kids avoid books would be to make them read Ayn Rand. There is even a South Park episode about how crappy Atlas Shrugged is.
@5
This was what KOSA was about, covering the Internet side of things. Fortunately it just died in the House – with bipartisan dissent no less – but the Christofascists will try again. And again, and again, and again.
I saw some library censorship in college, when I was working there. It was a Catholic, Jesuit university and was generally fairly liberal and open to new ideas. Nevertheless, after there were several complaints, the library’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves was pulled from the shelf. It wound up on the giveaway table as a free book for library employees and I grabbed it.
When my four daughters reached their teens, I gave them each Our Bodies, Ourselves for Teens. I was that impressed and influenced by that “naughty” book.
@29 tallora
And KOSA proceeded to sail through the U.S. senate, 91 to 3.
It’s book banning so high-tech even Democrats approve of it. Someone needs to remind them they need to at least pretend to be an opposition party on issues like this.
@5 Raven
To be fair, they keep trying to screw up the internet too, and its often at least a bit bipartisan when they do. Got to, “protect the children”, from nudity (even if its nudists or artwork), medical information, if it involves even illustrations of body parts (though they backtrack on that fast them someone sues), or anything else they disapprove of. Though, of course, guns, violence, hate speech, etc., as long as its not aimed at white people or Christianity, is totally OK. So, yeah, its “harder” for them to keep people out of the internet, but some of them would love to slap a Chinese style state run “filter” over top it, complete with AI watching everything you do online, to look for anti-Republican sentiment and actions in your behavior (which, of course, the elite would be exempt from, as long as they keep supporting the fascist regime and they don’t get doxed publicly for it).
Where you can buy booze in Canada depends on which province you live in. Here in Saskatchewan you have to go to a liquor store or an off sale store connected to a restaurant or bar. The provincial government sold off the government run liquor stores, but kept the wholesale side of the business, which is where the money is. I don’t think kids are banned from being in a liquor store anymore, because I’ve seen parents bring them in.
Library restrictions on patrons isn’t some bold new concept. Actually, it’s a pretty old one:
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/freedom-libraries
‘Public libraries were not immune to racism post-Brown. Numerous libraries were desegregated on paper only: there would be no cards given to Black residents, no books for them read, and no furniture for them to use.’
These people have simply progressed to restricting the activities of the fine upstanding white families that live next door to them.
These same people are seemingly ignorant of the existence of the internet. I can go online and get a digital card from just about any library in the US, and download books to my phone or Ipad.
There’s Libby, Standard EBooks, and Project Gutenburg, Libgen, Overdirve, county and state libraries, and then there is Worldcat which will send you books from other libraries, from across the world, for free!
So, Idaho, when do you move science books into book jail? You can’t have the little ones delving into to books about biology or geology or anthropology unsupervised, can you? At least those books without your fundy spin incorporated into them. Let them freely read those things and pretty soon, their minds ain’t right and they start questioning the bible school lessons.
Oh, and don’t forget to gather up books on travel where they might learn about other places and people different from themselves. An open mind is the devils playground, you know.
While I don’t know the specifics of why Tolkien has to go to book jail, I can say that my opposition to the death penalty started with reading The Fellowship of the Ring:
Frodo complains about the wood elves of Mirkwood merely imprisoning Gollum rather than killing him, because he certainly deserves death. Gandalf replies, “Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”
That quote would probably be sufficient to get a MAGAt to ban the book.
@#34 lakitha tolbert
“These people have simply progressed to restricting the activities of the fine upstanding white families that live next door to them.”
Yep, and that shines a spotlight on just how perverse, and dare I say, “weird” these Republican Conservatives are. It reminds of all the towns that were forced to desegregate their swimming pools in the 1950s and 60s that chose to simply fill in the pools instead. Rather than let little Black children have the same fun as White children, better to take the fun away from everyone. Weirdos!
#37 moarscienceplz
This is OT, but I love your internet handle!
And yeah, I wholeheartedly agree.
These people are just f***ing weird!
They didn’t want the white children to socialize with the non-white ones. Because then they would make friends of all races and grow up not fearing or hating people with different skin colors. And there’s nothing a bigot more desperately desires than to ensure that their bigotry is passed on into the next generation. Somehow it acts almost like a virus or a “selfish gene” or something, forcing its host to spread it …