Missouri House Republicans vote to defund libraries | Hacker News Reader

Missouri House Republicans vote to defund libraries

heartlandsignal.com

71 pointsherbertl58 comments

As stated in the article, the initiative is dead in the water, as per the Missouri constitution:

> Article IX Section 10. Free public libraries—declaration of policy—state aid to local public libraries.—It is hereby declared to be the policy of the state to promote the establishment and development of free public libraries and to accept the obligation of their support by the state and its subdivisions and municipalities in such manner as may be provided by law. When any such subdivision or municipality supports a free library, the general assembly shall grant aid to such public library in such manner and in such amounts as may be provided by law.

I found this with a simple ctrl-f. However, thanks to the MO Library Association for knowing their law and educating people, otherwise I never would have looked.

It’s cute that you think the republicans care about their constitution

That’s not what that user is saying.

Is "Policy" enforceable? Isn't "in such amounts as may be provided by law" meaningless if they change the law?

I don’t know.

> in such manner as may be provided by law.

>in such manner and in such amounts as may be provided by law.

Set amount = 0;

Set manner_of_support = "spiritual";

"in such manner as may be provided by law"

"in such amounts as may be provided by law"

Isn't this the law providing the manner and amounts?

“may be provided by law” means optional, right? I mean, what if a statute says 0% state funds, 100% local funds?

That's not how it works though. The American system is reactive. Meaning, you could see something like this enacted with years of disruption, even if it is ultimately over turned.

Worse, if the court really wants to protect the law, they use "standing weaselry" to effectively protect it from being challenged.

This looks like a red-meat bill that won't pass both houses but it's a big deal that it made it through one. Usually these die in committee or never get schedule for a floor vote.

My rule of thumb is that if something sounds completely evil and it exactly conforms to a political stereotype, there must be more to the story.

The article itself is somewhat thin on the details. Would anyone who knows more about the situation be able to give some nuance? I have a feeling this is brinkmanship at play.

Sometimes it really is though, and the Republican party has been openly performing actions like this straight out of fascist playbooks.

Yes, see my linked article elsewhere in the thread. The libraries wanted to make porn available to kids, the republicans said if they did that they would try to pull their funding, and the libraries called them on it.

Because we all know that banning photo books that include that statue of David protects your children.

The basic chain of events is:

Teachers wanted to have books like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cd5VUhMrF4 available in classrooms (this is on the MO 'banned books' list). Parents (obviously) objected to this, but the teachers/librarians dug their heels in.

Due to a loss of trust, parents started demanding oversight into everything that the schools/libraries were making available, and that's how you end up with absolutely crazy things like banning photos of the statue of David.

TLDW: Erika Moen (web cartoonist) wrote a book called "Let's Talk About It: The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships and Being Human"; in the chapter on sexting she advises teens that pictures they send to people can never be deleted and therefore they should crop out their faces and any identifying birthmarks, etc, before sending one. A concerned parent read this passage at a school board meeting to protest this books inclusion in the library. Hilarity ensues.

but this is about public libraries, not school libraries. also, the linked video is from Alaska, not Missouri.

"The libraries wanted to make porn available to kids"

I couldn't find that mentioned anywhere in the linked article...?

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/new-ru...

> libraries wanted to make porn available to kids

this is an extremely bad faith interpretation of librarians upholding the first amendment.

> The libraries wanted to make porn available to kids

Assuming that you consider every single one of the titles on this list to be “porn”, but while many of them might be dubiously appropriate for (especially young) children, I don’t think very many of them meet any reasonable definition of “porn”.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AVW8q-B4uSZIJ3mLqc5t...

> The libraries wanted to make porn available to kids

I see you skipped the “nuance” part of the request.

I'm an American who leans politically center-right. Here's my opinionated perspective on this issue.

In recent years, public libraries across the US and UK have hosted a number of Drag Queen Story Hours. These are events where men dressed as sexual parodies of women read books to young children. Sometimes the men dance provocatively for the kids, or wear revealing outfits, or have kids climb all over them:

https://alphanews.org/drag-queen-flashes-crotch-to-children-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VA72t7o24I

https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Drag...

Several performers and sponsors of these events have turned out to be sex offenders:

https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/houston-public-libra...

https://reduxx.info/drag-queen-charged-with-25-counts-of-fel...

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/second-drag-queen-story-ho...

Across the pond, the founder of Drag Queen Story Hour UK has tweeted "love has no age" and openly associates with pedophiles:

https://thepostmillennial.com/founder-of-uk-drag-queen-story...

At the same time, "child-friendly" and "all-ages" drag shows have popped up at gay bars and clubs across the US. These are often much more sexually provocative than shows hosted in libraries:

https://reduxx.info/children-tipped-drag-queens-during-perfo...

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1543662744616013825

https://twitter.com/TaylerUSA/status/1538733481492094977

Far-left militia armed with AR-15s have shown up at some all-ages shows to "protect" them from protestors. The armed militants in these photos are self-identified anti-fascists:

https://www.axios.com/local/dallas/2022/08/30/drag-brunch-ro...

These events have become the focus intense polarization. Republicans say they're sexual performances designed to desensitize kids to advances from adults. Democrats say they're expressions of LGBT pride.

There is a growing conservative backlash to "all-ages" or "family-friendly" drag events generally and Drag Queen Story Hour in particular. Many parents are uncomfortable with the sexual displays aimed at children. Some women see drag as sexual blackface. This backlash is framed by Democrats as opposition to drag shows in general, which generally speaking is untrue. It is the targeting of young children that aggravates conservatives.

Librarians host these events in taxpayer-funded venues. The elected government of the state of Missouri seeks to limit this practice.

“It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom! it’s all over.”

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

We really are in the beggining (or maybe middle?) of something nasty. Reminiscent of things you read in history books. Certainly makes me want to leave the country. Turmoil of this scale in the US is probably something of a worldwide event though, unfortunately.

A lot of cultural revolution-esque actions unfortunately.

Yes, it's called fascism.

Government by grifters for grifters and con artists. It can't get much nastier.

Better article here: https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/new-ru...

>The rule introduced by Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft would block state funding for libraries if they allow minors to access books that are pornographic or labeled as obscene under state statutes

So the headline could be restated as: Libraries in Missouri insist on making porn available to children, and lose their funding. In fact, it doesn't even say they can't have porn, it just says that they can't give it out to little kids.

As somebody with young kids: can these people, on both sides, please stop trying to use my kids as soldiers in their petty culture wars?

I want to be able to send my kids to a school and trust that the teachers there aren't going to try and use that as an opportunity to indoctrinate them. Teach them history, teach them math, and then leave them alone to be children.

Here's what *IS* happening as a result of this culture war, and the insistence on making children be the pawns in it: the people who can afford it aren't sending their kids to public schools anymore. What this means is that public schools turn into proverbial ghettos; the places where only the kids who couldn't get out go.

That is absolutely horrible. The idea of a public education should be something we're proud of as a society, but we're watching it be destroyed in the interest of a tiny minority of teachers and administrators pushing radical ideologies. The school, or the library, is not the place for this, and this absolutely tiny minority of activists is ruining a public good for everyone.

"The banned books include graphic novels such as Batman and X-Men, a copy of Reader’s Digest, works about artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, graphic novel adaptations of classics by William Shakespeare and Mark Twain, the Pulitzer-prize winning graphic novel Maus and other books about the Holocaust, and The Children’s Bible."

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/nearly-300-books-re...

Here's the full list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AVW8q-B4uSZIJ3mLqc5t...

Here is a parent reading aloud from the book (on this list) "Let's talk about it": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cd5VUhMrF4

He's reading about how, as a child, you can send sexually explicit photos to people on the internet. It seems *completely* reasonable to remove this book from libraries.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, but demonstrative of exactly the type of erosion of trust I'm talking about WRT to the discourse around this topic, Batman and X-Men comics are not the focus of these types of book bans.

> Batman and X-Men comics are not the focus of these types of book bans

They never are. But hey, while we're at it, can we ban the bible, too? It's quite a violent book.

"The Children's Bible" is one of the titles on the list.

> Batman and X-Men comics are not the focus of these types of book bans.

If they are on the list, they are part of the focus of the ban, whether or not they are part of what is used in the public propaganda.

(That the public propaganda for these bans misrepresent the actual focus is another area of concern, of course.)

“Think of the children” is the oldest excuse in the book and is almost exclusively used to make sure your detractors/opposition look like they don’t care about children. In an age where seemingly half the GOP calls democrats “pedophiles” at the drop of a hat, this is an obvious tactic they’ll draw on.

What indoctrination is actually going on? It’s a convenient bogeyman, but as someone that went through the public school system, and with younger siblings that did so after me, I’m honestly not sure what people mean by this.

I'd expect that it's not the pornographic bit, but the labelled as obscene bit that's the sticking point. I visited a lot of libraries in my youth, youth librarians actually don't make it a practice to give kids porn usually, kids seek that out on their own, it's part of their capacious nature. Also many books in libraries typically get donated (directly or via financial donations), especially in poorer areas, and porn is not really on the shortlist of things librarians tend to want to prioritize money for. Wouldn't it be better to prosecute specific misconduct than to create committees of politicians for book censorship?

> I’d expect that it’s not the pornographic bit, but the labelled as obscene bit that’s the sticking point.

Obsecenity is a legal category, and not all pornography is obscenity. OTOH, “labelled as obscene” may not actually be obscenity, and the list of the actual books banned under the law that this defunding is a retaliation for a lawsuit against seems to largely be books that are neither obscene nor pornographic.

Yep, agreed! I'm not even so sure the Miller test makes much sense:

``` (1) whether the average person applying contemporary community standards would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (2) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (3) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. ```

I feel like all of this is downstream of the same trans panic that's going on right now. And all of it is exactly the same as the 70s and 80s gay/satanic panics.

Not to mention the destruction of places of knowledge but this move destroys one of the last free third places in existence.

I wonder if there's some for-profit book rental company supporting this bill or its sponsors.

Oh, so protecting the children AND fighting homelessness? I'm sure there are plenty that see that as a two-for-one win.

How is defunding libraries protecting children and fighting homelessness...?

If they have to axe places of public congregation to shore up the budget, before Republicans cut schools, libraries and parks, I propose they start with churches and their tax exemption.

Does the state of Missouri fund churches?

Edit: Beat me to it with the tax exemption edit.

Yes: Through tax exemptions, faith based grants, vouchers and other methods.

The Missouri GOP is on a roll.

They also want to get rid of the sales tax on guns and ammo.

But they're willing to make diapers and feminine products tax-exempt as well. Peak American Compromise.

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries Anais Nin

When librarians and teachers are your enemies, you are on the wrong side.

What quality do librarians and teachers possess that makes them infallible?

Who's talking about infallibility? We're talking about literally making librarians a political enemy.

knowledge and education, to name two.

>What quality do librarians and teachers possess that makes them infallible?

When did the they say anything remotely along those lines? If you think libraries/educators across the board are an enemy that need to be fought then you need to take a step back and really assess where that mentality is coming from.

Why?

Half their constituents can't/don't read. If they did, they probably wouldn't be voting for them.

You just answered your own question.

Missouri has pretty average literacy rates actually.

No need to resort to insulting an entire state/play into stereotypes when the legislature’s actions are bad enough on their own.

How can you logically separate the legislature from the voters that elected them?

Voters got the legislature they deserved.

It's one thing to say "their constituents support bad policies and are being cruel," which is totally fair. They are being cruel. They are supporting bad policies. They are often voting in a way that is even against their own self-interest just to "own the libs." But it's another to call them literally illiterate and play into redneck stereotypes, i.e. engaging in the exact same of social behavior they do against their political opponents.

What they are doing and supporting is terrible on its own.

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