Missouri lawmakers move to strip library funding, retaliate for book ban lawsuit
kansascity.com
kansascity.com
The worst part was that this guy was beyond reproach - he went out of his way to notify people and said he wouldn't mention it to news outlets etc until the issue was resolved. It was a clear case of the governor misusing his power to prosecute a free press that he didn't like using a pretext he knew was incorrect. While it's funny to poke at the governor for this, I personally believe it should have caused his removal from office.
https://missouriindependent.com/2022/02/23/claim-that-report...
excerpt:
State education officials initially wanted to thank Renaud for discovering the problem that, as investigators would learn, has existed undetected since 2011. And an FBI agent who looked at the incident informed the state that it was “not an actual network intrusion,” noting that the website in question “allowed open source tools to be used to query data that should not be public.”
State officials made it clear the information was on a public site, it was not encrypted or password protected and the reporter was not anywhere he wasn’t allowed.
The governor decided to blame a government failing on the reporter who discovered it.
Despite all this, Parson convened a press conference to label the reporter a “hacker” and demand a highway patrol investigation. He accused the Post-Dispatch of trying to use the security flaw to embarrass him, and his political action committee launched ads to raise money off Parson’s attacks.and most of the people there to use the internet don't have access to the web on their own -- they're not going to be the most internet savvy users.
it's not impossible for Jim-Bob the toothless iterant to get to the Pronz on library computer -- i'm sure it happens, in much the same way i'm sure it happens on school computer lab systems -- but it is certainly the minority.
tbh i'd be more worried about doomscrollers and kids playing online games burning bandwidth and bogarting the systems
> but I never hear about lawmakers attempting to shut down the internet or part of the internet
They definitely like to meddle there too.
Schools are publicly funded by taxes; those taxes are apportioned by elected representatives. The legislature has the right to dictate what the money can and can't be used for. That's not censorship.
It's a huge violation of the spirit of libraries. It is effectively censorship. I guaranteed that the bible, despite portraying just about every subject they are trying to hide, is present in every single school library in the state.
Saying that kids only get free access to the books the state legislators agree with is absolutely censorship.
so what was going on in all those other cases?
>they'll try to remove it from the [everywhere else] too"
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/05/gop-lawmaker-petitions-c...
hey look they've already started escalating. Now, that one got dismissed but yeah, your "steelman" is not in fact "silly"
Also, a nakedly unconstitutional attempt to control the inventory of a private company is not exactly the greatest example of an escalating.
Removing certain books from all the libraries is what we call "banning" those books. That's literally what the term means.
> you can just go actually read the text of these laws
Here, kid, no Judy Bloom for you, but you can read the law that prohibits her book? That's just sick.
That's worse than censorship.
This is big government stepping in to override decisions of local governments that they disagree with.
It's censorship and an infringement on the basic constitutional rights of public employees to independently make purchasing decisions for the government.
Because any parents could pay for private school on their own dime.
It's the same as choosing to include one bible and pointedly not another.
I object to my taxes you mentioned being used in that manner. I pay for education not indoctrination and ignorance. A large, perhaps the largest function of education is to expose the mind to the variety of the world. Selectively masking off parts of it is literally creating ignorance not education.
(Caution: these links might be NSFW, but they are blurred)
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Screen...
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Screen...
(Edit: only one page is from Gender Queer, another is from a different book that was removed.)
If a parent wanted to give this book to their child at an appropriate age, that'd be fine, but just hanging out on a shelf at primary schools with very young kids seems like too much.
I really wish schools would focus on the basics: reading, mathematics, writing. There are too many educators that are trying to mold them into indoctrination facilities for politics and new theories of identity. There is plenty of time to do that at university.
> (Caution: these links might be NSFW, but they are blurred)
> https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Screen...
> https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Screen...
> If a parent wanted to give this book to their child at an appropriate age, that'd be fine, but just hanging out on a shelf at primary schools with very young kids seems like too much.
> I really wish primary schools would focus on the basics: reading, mathematics, writing. There are too many educators that are trying to mold them into indoctrination facilities for politics and new theories of identity. There is plenty of time to do that at university.
I've read that book and it's not aimed at children. No sane educator or library person would offer that to a young child.
Also what you're leaving out is that behind the pixelation isn't a penis but a strap on. The second image isn't contained in the book at all.
Stop spreading misinformation.
That's the problem:
https://www.wlky.com/article/gender-queer-book-louisville-jc...
https://foxchattanooga.com/news/nation-world/high-school-lib...
https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/news/2022/05/10/lgbtq-me...
https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclu...
https://wgme.com/news/local/turner-community-members-weigh-i...
There's plenty more, and even more that had it but were forced to remove it after parent backlash.
>> I've read that book and it's not aimed at children. No sane educator or library person would offer that to a young child.
> That's the problem: <lists articles>
The first article is about 2 high schools.
The second article is about a high school.
The third article is about a high school.
The fourth article is about a high school.
The fifth article is also about a... wait for it!... a high school.
High schools are not primary schools and high schoolers are not young children.
(Also: the whole conversation is hilariously non-unique to libraries. 90% of male teens watch porn, and that's probably an under-estimate given that porn is embarrassing/stigmatizing... I promise you there are exactly zero high schoolers in this entire country who have access to this book in their school library who do not also have infinitely easier access to near-infinite amounts of actual porn.)
So should the high school library have a hentai section next to the manga? Hustlers on the magazine rack next to Newsweek? Lots of teens vape, so no one should have a problem with vape juice vending machines in the cafeteria, right? Wouldn't it make sense for the school district to have a PornHub subscription to supplement ProQuest?
The fact that teens do some thing does not at all imply it's appropriate for a school setting.
You are employing an old and tired strategy: latching onto any lewd expression and then dismissing the rest of the work whole cloth as purely pornographic. This is exactly the same strategy as was used in e.g. the Howl obscenity trial [1].
Anyways, I reject the premise. These books aren't attacked because they contain pornographic scenes. These books are attacked because of the people, identities, and viewpoints they represent and affirm. It's about bigotry, not the kids. As evidenced by the fact that these comments even crop up on articles such as this one, where the article isn't even about school libraries [2].
Sex and sexuality are deeply important parts of being human and it's possible to have uncensored discussion of this part of humanity without reaching for Hustler or hentai. I'm saddened that there are apparently people who aren't able to distinguish between uncensored discussion and straight up porn. Who cannot read or think or talk about sex without their brains pulling up hentai and pin-up girl style pornography. What an impoverished experience of humanity these people must have. No wonder they are so angry all the time.
[1] https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Howl_Obscenity_T...
[2] See https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages/LibraryDevelopment/FY22WebP... and https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages/LibraryDevelopment/FY22WebP...; $0.00 of the funds discussed in this article go to school libraries.
And most of the time the people referencing the book haven't even read it is what drives me nuts. It'd be so easy to pick things that were actually in the book but they always have to go one step too far and make shit up. We live in a world where these idiots read something and blindly share it without doing a shred of research. Anything that supports their bigoted views.
Not in this case. Those images are 100% graphic porn (of the cartoon/hentai variety). I saw the pictures upthread. Porn that presents itself as "educational" is still porn (IIRC, that's also a actual real-people-having-sex porn genre).
> These books aren't attacked because they contain pornographic scenes. These books are attacked because of the people, identities, and viewpoints they represent and affirm.
You do realize those aren't mutually exclusive? The wrong people attacking it on the wrong grounds is not justification for stocking pornography in a school library.
As I said, the first picture is taken out of context and the second one isn't even in the book. This book is porn the same way other educational material about anatomy and sexuality are porn.
There isn't a context that could make that first POV/frontal view picture of someone getting a blowjob not-porn.
If that's appropriate for school, so is hentai.
To go further, almost everyone agrees that a cartoon of a man and woman having sex in the missionary position for the purpose of procreation is not necessarily pornographic; this is a standard sort of picture in age appropriate sex education materials.
Granted, these images concern sexual reproduction. However this only makes me question why people deem that image appropriate, but images of other positions or acts not worthy of learning about in other contexts.
The fact is that we do learn about sex at school for other reasons. "Safe sex", consent, and in many cases contraception are all taught.
So hypothetically, if we're fine with images to educate about reproduction, and images to educate about consent or safe sex for nonreproductive purposes, what makes the images in the book so different as to deserve to be forbidden knowledge?
How-to sex guides and the like are not appropriate for a high school library.
> To go further, almost everyone agrees that a cartoon of a man and woman having sex in the missionary position for the purpose of procreation is not necessarily pornographic; this is a standard sort of picture in age appropriate sex education materials.
Is it? I don't recall having been shown anything like that.
And I would say a cartoon of two characters having sex and showing penetration would necessarily be pornographic. A medical illustration wouldn't (think stiff, cutaway diagram, narrowly focused on the necessary parts), but that's not a "cartoon."
> Granted, these images concern sexual reproduction. However this only makes me question why people deem that image appropriate, but images of other positions or acts not worthy of learning about in other contexts.
I think you need to figure out the difference between sex education and a sex guide on your own. You're playing fast and loose with categories, and getting yourself tied in knots as a result.
I wasn't saying they necessarily are; I was saying that such a representation isn't necessarily pornographic.
>Is it? I don't recall having been shown anything like that.
I do, even if it was many years ago.
>I think you need to figure out the difference between sex education and a sex guide on your own.
I have figured it out; the fact is that there is a continuum of representations of sex between a cut-out diagram of the interior anatomy of a penis penetrating the interior anatomy of a vagina, a diagram showing how a condom is applied, a picture of one adult on top of another in a book in a "How are Babies Made" sort of book for children, and showing how sex with a strap-on works. I don't see any reason to consider any of these necessarily pornographic - as all lack the primary intention to titillate.
And again, this wasn't even a penis in that picture. This is definitely not a book to be considered porn. And if you haven't read it, I don't think you can convince anyone otherwise.
Those seem to all be about high school libraries.
My recollection of high school is that by the time we reached it we'd seen far more than what's in that book, and we wouldn't have thought the book was a big deal.
But maybe it is different in high school nowadays. We didn't have the internet. Maybe kids now have such an overwhelmingly amount of wholesome entertainment via the internet that by the time they reach high school they have yet to get around to looking at sex stuff, so it would be a big shock to them?
It doesn't belong in a high school library either.
I thought they were exaggerating when they said it that book was pornography, but holy shit it was literally true.
What's next? A hentai section in the school library next to the manga?
[EDIT] "Wait, so why's that not what the outlets and politicians who are complaining about this, are advising as the right way to approach this?" because the entire point of making this non-issue an issue in the first place was to boost state and national level candidates, not to do anything useful or appropriate—a state governor can't grandstand about "get mad, and go... um... vote in your school board elections!" in a way that'll be effective at building their national profile or driving broader GOTV for their side.
Maybe they should do that too (and I believe that's actually not uncommon), but it doesn't preclude or de-legitimize other political action to address the problem.
In any case, tactical criticism such as yours is almost always noise. It usually amounts to a veiled instruction to surrender, and in any case would be constructed against any tactic chosen (e.g. "whatever it is you're doing, it's not the right way and you should stop and do some other thing). Also, opponents are motivated to give poor tactical advice and typically do so.
> because the entire point of making this non-issue an issue in the first place was to boost state and national level candidates, not to do anything useful or appropriate
Come on. All sides are grandstanding all the time nowadays, even on this particular issue. Complaints about it are almost always soaked with myside bias.
Agreed, but exactly one side made this fake issue A Thing.
There's an overlap between these sort of hyper-reactionary people and politically motivated street toughs, who are likely to keep escalating such situations because it's strategically effective.
A "Kindergarten is Mostly Singing Songs about Jesus" charter elementary, OTOH? We may have a few hundred of those already.
What does this mean for libraries? $4.5 million can't have been enough to fund a statewide library network so presumably libraries are getting funding from elsewhere.
A quick search suggests there are 171 public libraries in Missouri. This works out to $26,315 per library. I'm sure that money is appreciated but that can't be significant.
You can see where aid goes here: https://www.sos.mo.gov/library/development/stateaid/default
And then you can look up or estimate the total spend for each of those community's libraries.
Likely this means approximately nothing for most suburban, urban, and exurban/college town/resort town/etc. library systems. Those communities can easily cover the difference, and their libraries have large enough budgets that a 20K hit is barely felt. Might lose some overtime or a very part-time librarian, or reduce some fringe services, or most likely just re-appropriate a rounding error's worth of local funds to make up the difference.
Very well might mean a death sentence or significant service degradation for many of the state's rural libraries.
According to some cursory searches, Washington State (where I live) has 2,500 libraries for 7.7 million people and Missouri has somewhere between 171 and 400 libraries for 6.1 million people.
At some point the horse dies and the stick is no longer motivational.
Predominantly.
> Seems like either they are serving their constituents, or they'll be voted out next time?
It satisfies an immediate vengeance, but is very "cut off my nose to spite my face" for rural Missourians. In 10 years when the "drag queens in libraries" moral panic is long forgotten, these communities will lament the loss of their libraries.
Your question is deep, and gets to the heart of why we even bother electing representatives in the first place.
If reps are only there to channel the emotional state of their constituents, then what's the point of having representative democracy? If representation does not come with some expectation of leadership, then representation is a poor proxy for public will with no upside. If elected officials have no moral responsibility or practical expectation to lead -- and are just reactionary automata -- then get rid of the politicians and do everything via the ballot box.
Iowa is pulling the same stunts, and then acts all surprised when they have trouble hiring teachers.
What is the best argument for allowing elementary school children to read about sexaul intercourse?
Of course that solution would be objected to by both sides. The social leftists think it's literally a death sentence to trans children to not teach 6-year-olds about anal sex, and populist conservatives think sex ed in any capacity is degenerate pedophilia.
Where... where has any leftist said that?
If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
Bad assumption. That's a fundamental POV difference between "I pay taxes to fund the public education system" and "I pay taxes to pay for kids to go to some school". The notion that those tax dollars belong to the parents and not specifically the public school system depends on which of those you think is, or should be, the case.
For my part, if the money's not exclusively funding the public school system, I don't want to pay any taxes toward schools. Talk about bottom up!
[EDIT] FWIW I'm actually for allowing districts to experiment with this, because I doubt mine would do it and I think the results would be hilarious, but would prefer not to have to move to another state to avoid it, so would rather the red parts of my state not impose it on my district.
The unwarranted assumption you make in this comment is that legislation in USA reflects the will of the population. That is very rarely the case, and this is a perfect example. No one in this state woke up this morning worried about porn in an elementary school library.
I support vouchers, because even imperfect improvements are improvements. If a child isn't being served by a school, even poor parents should be able to do something about that. We can imagine a world in which the public schools offer enough options to help every child, but we don't live there yet.
Indeed. I think jessuastin probably meant something like nationalized identity-driven politics. It's a valid difference.
> If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
I like choice but not vouchers. There are basically two issues with vouchers.
The first is that they're usually implemented in a fashion that is simultaneously regressive (on income) and re-distributive (on geography). Ie, they're often implemented as pure grift.
The second, and more important, is that we already have experimented with a hybrid public/private system where some public funds flow to private options! The result is runaway spending and the market driving emphasis toward a bunch of bullshit cost disease stuff instead of actual learning outcomes. No matter how bad our public K12 system is, you will never convince me that our higher ed system is better, and that's what an American public/private hybrid system would, empirically, end up converging to.
I could get behind a voucher system that (1) gives each kid the same amount of cash and also (2) caps all tuition and fees for any school receiving even a dollar of voucher cash.
I'd also be okay with just not providing state funding for education at all, but it'd be a sort of terrible world for most families and I genuinely wonder how many people realize how bad things would get for most families...
As for top-down meddling, I agree with that. The Department of Education has been the worst thing for America's education system, not to mention half-baked federal policies on healthy eating.
The issue is that teachers and the administration are the government in most places. So if we are to have less meddling it would be to empower the parents to make decisions - to draw the line as you say - and force the schools and the teachers to follow that line.
State legislatures are mostly not democratic. Rather than implementing the will of their constituents, state legislators spend their time campaigning and representing for those who fund their campaigning. TFA is just another example.
"...to draw the line as you say..."
To be clear, you introduced this banal cliche, and I used it once in response.
The books these conservatives want to ban aren't porn, they're complex stories about complex topics that your kids may have to deal with themselves. If you don't want them reading that stuff do your job as a parent.
They're not talking about porn, they're talking about any coming of age story that deals with sex at all.
However, this law applies to more than just libraries. I know of at least one case when I was in High School where a teacher was accused of giving a student a Play Boy magazine and I believe this case played a part in that teachers dismissal.
I never said that I felt the law was necessary, only that I read it and that it is not what is being portrayed here.
I wouldn't assume any elementary-school librarian is stocking the kind of books you're concerned about, and I think it's possible you're being fed a line by politicians and the media, to drum up outrage and support for a narrative.
Or, in the case of this article, about public, non-school libraries.
(I guess an elementary school kid or middle school kid could order a book via the inter-library loan system, but that's sort of a stupid caveat since typing pornhub.com into a smartphone or desktop browser is several orders of magnitude easier than knowing about and learning how to use the ILL system.)
First, we’re not talking to kids about intercourse. We’re saying kids need to have some amount of knowledge about this stuff that is appropriate for their age.
For example, small kids who are put into the care of strangers need to be aware that adults are not allowed to touch them without permission. They need to know the proper names for their private parts because it’s more difficult to understand if a kid is being abused when they’re using strange euphemisms. They need to understand that they shouldn’t be ashamed to tell an adult if someone touches them in a way that makes them uncomfortable.
Are these conversations I want to have with my young child? Hell no! But they’re necessary for a kid his age. I wouldn’t be doing my job as a parent if I didn’t teach him these things.
The reality is that it’s going to be a series of age appropriate conversations every few years, because he’s going to need to know a little more as he gets older.
And if parents are sending their kids into the world without this kind of age appropriate information then they’re putting their kids at serious risk for abuse. Frankly, this is the kind of situation where I’d be glad that schools and libraries are making age appropriate materials like this available for kids; to help the kids whose parents aren’t doing their jobs.
Where are those people today? Why are they not more vocal? Or were these values always just a veneer for something else that now comes to light?
When you hear talk about the establishment versus populist wings of the GOP, this is what's being referred to.
Freedom of speech is code for a lot of things. In conservative circles it means the right to burn books, incite insurrections, and eventually burn crosses on the lawns of people of color and have women wear red robes and white headscarves.
'FaFo' is shorthand for 'Fuck around and find out', yes? I'm not sure this internet tough guy approach is going to persuade anyone.
The school provides a good space to learn something a bit more realistic about sexuality at the appropriate ages. But of course as a european I know that the US in parts has extremely prude ideas (your censorship also affects us).
That being said, there are many modern nations where kids learn about sex in school for a while now, and they didn't develop psychological trauma or anxiety because of that (quite the opposite). It isn't as if there are no studies done in that field.
But prude morality seems to trump everything. Some don't seem to realize that supressing sexuality is something religions tend to do for a reason (and it is not the good of their hearts).
Not if the funds are just spent elsewhere.
In the end, the only hope the republican party has to survive as the older generation passes is to rely on lies of this nature to divide enough people that vote based on moral outrage instead of fact.
It's a total of $4.5 million across all libraries in the state. In other words, nothing.
Libraries aren't a luxury, they are a valuable community resource, especially in tough economic times. This is a place where people can get access to the Internet and education, which helps them get jobs, which allows them to support themselves and ultimately pay taxes.
Unfortunately, one of the primary political parties is actively waging war on education and information.
According to the article the total budget is $50 billion.
Knowledge and truth itself are being eroded; on the one hand, very intentionally and precipitously by politicians and corporations enacting authoritarianism for power, and in a more insidious way by ChatGPT and its ilk which can convince you of hallucinations as easily as fact.
When I was young 2 decades ago, I already perceived we had peaked, so it's interesting to watch how clear signs of it are becoming everyday news