You originally said: “Palin didn’t fire any librarian.”

The article says: “A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired.”

How does the latter not contradict the former?

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I have no need to dispute the article. It says no books were ever banned and that the librarian resigned two months after Sarah Palin began her second term. That confirms the accuracy of my post, no matter how you try to spin it.

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Not the Koran. Nor the Bible. The dangers stemming from those books come not from what they say but how people interpret and act on those ideas.

You compared the Koran to Mein Kampf, but Hitler’s book was actually a contemporary manifesto, laying out his motivations and plans. Ancient texts don’t rise to that level. Osama bin Laden’s writings, if published in book form, would be more of an equivalent.

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BTW, yes, we also want our kids to grow up to be able to discern propaganda from reasoned arguments/opinions. We started to teach them about this initially using ads. “What are they selling? What are they trying to get you to believe? Is it true that you NEED x?”, etc…

As Bible scholar, too, my husband points out underlying assumptions or presuppositions to the kids, and we discuss why different denominations share some beliefs, and where they differ. We don’t swallow the “party line” when it comes to religion, or politics, either.

We just want to travel this road with our children for a while longer, and make sure they’re not gullible readers/listeners, before they spread their wings.

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Yes, I’m kind of kidding.

We do very much police what our daughter is allowed to read and watch. In that respect, despiter our liberal bent, my wife and I tend to err much more on the conservative side, certainly much more so than we find our friends and neighbors doing.

I think there is much less problem today, with students being isolated from the world of ideas by their parents. Certainly, it’s comfortable to think they will never read things that challenge our ideas as parents, but ultimately, I think we would all, conservative or liberal, hope that as they get into their high school years and beyond, our children read widely, from a variety of ideas, learn to think for themselves, and form their own opinions. Even, or maybe especially, if they differ from our own.

I believe this it the right that the UN seeks to promote, rather than unfettered access to any and all of the garbage and filth that is out there.

Liberals and conservatives – at least the ones I know – are probably less dissimilar in how we raise our children, and what we permit them access to, than we would think.

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For instance, the parents of the Columbine killers were rightly faulted for not knowing what their sons were up to, and yet the ALA wants kids to have access to anything, without parental permission, or even knowledge. Those boys had some pretty sinister influences, and shouldn’t have had access to all that.

An extreme example, but it makes my point. Parents need the freedom to rear their children without threat of bureaucratic interference. My concern is that this type of hysteria (about “banned” books) contributes to other redefinitions, such as “abuse”. Abuse could come to mean not letting my child read Harry Potter, or not letting my child get a tattoo, or some other small limiting of his “freedom”.

In Germany, homeschooling is considered child abuse today, and parents are fined and/or jailed for not sending their children to the government’s schools.

Just pointing out the slippery slope.

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I shudder to think that my daughter might grow up to become a conservative.

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Cheryl framed the argument well. Banned has been redefined to mean anything short of complete access to anything by anyone, including children.

BTW, I believe the UN promotes this nonsense of preventing parents from filtering their childrens’ access to various types of media in the Rights of the Child treaty they are trying to get passed.

Another reason to support legislation protecting parental rights.

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Aren’t there a few things that could actually make a book illegal, as Chalzz mentioned in #12? For instance, it seems that a book or magazine containing child pornography would be illegal to print, sell, or buy.

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