Date: Sun, 04 Jan 1998 02:48:50 -0500 Dear Friends & Supporters:
An organization you may not have heard too much about is one called "Family Friendly Libraries" (FFL), and like most groups with the word "Family" in them, how much good they do for families is highly suspect. But one thing that is certain about this group is that they are NOT friendly towards libraries.
While on the face FFL says they are not proponents of censorship, and only wish to restrict certain "adult" materials from access by children, I just did a little bit of research on the internet about the group to find that they are in fact another one of the religious right organizations that, at its heart, wants to impose its own idealogy on the rest of us. And perhaps even more dangerous that the groups we're more familiar with, their pushing their agenda with a deceptively kind face. They got off the ground with a grant from the American Family Association.
FFL was formed when Phil Burress, president of Cincinnati's Citizens for Community Values, teamed up with Karen Jo Gounaud, an anti-library activist from Springfield, Virginia and set their sights on restricting access to books, magazines, and films they deemed inappropriate. Burress describes his agenda with candor, "Right to read? It's a bunch of hogwash," he says. "You don't have the right to read anything you want. We have to protect each other from dangerous material."
And indeed other reported incidences also show the true face of Family Friendly Libaries. One of Gounaud's first successes was having copies of "The Blade", a gay newspaper, removed from a place in her own local library with other publications and put away on a shelf where children would not see the publication. Throughout there activities can be seen a very real hostility towards our gay citizens.
The following letter from FFL Gwinnett County activist Judy Craft appeared in the AJC. I am urging each of you to respond to this letter in your own words. As I said before the media has not covered this organization very much, but as I am just beginning my research of their activities, I can already see that their insidious tactics and hidden agenda come right out of the radical religious right's playbook; the goal is the same.
Please respond with a letter to the editor of your own. Let them know how you feel about library censorship. FAX responses to AJC, 404-526-5610.
Thanks so much for your time,
Skip Evans, President Wrong Place for 'Basketball Diaries'
The 14-year old boy in Paducah, Ky., charged with killing three of his classmates and wounding five others Dec. 1., said he had been influenced by the movie "The Basketball Diaries." Coincidentally, a neighbor told me about an audio cassette he checked out at a Peachtree Corners library. Thinking he was checking out a videocassette about basketball, he was shocked by the vile contents: filthy language, references to drug use, sex and violence. That cassette was "The Basketball Diaries." I discovered that the system owns about 13 copies of the book and 15 copies of the book on tape.
Is this the best use of our tax dollars? Books can enrich a society. But as the tragedy in Paducah illustrates, books and movies of a violent nature in the hands of a maladjusted individual can be deadly. The Paducah shootings could have been at one of our high schools.
-- Judy Craft, co-founder of the Gwinnett chapter of Citizens for Family Friendly Libraries.
Talking Points:
1. The back cover of the paperback version of "The Basketball Diaries" states,
"Today Jim Carroll is a renowned poet and rock performer. But in the mid-1960s, during his coming-of-age from twelve to fifteen, he was a rebellious teenager making a place and a name for himself on the unforgiving streets of New York City. During these years, he chronicled his experiences, and the result is a diary of unparalleled candor that conveys his alternately hilarious and terrifying teenage existence. Here is Carroll prowling New York City-playing basketball, hustling, stealing, getting high, getting hooked, and searching for something pure."
The fact that a person is using a library implies a minimal "quest for knowledge" and some level of intelligence yet this "neighbor" couldn't tell a videocassette from an audio cassette and chose the item solely on the title, when a quick glance at the description of the work revealed it as a rather graphic "coming of age" autobiography. Librarians are available to help, and the libraries are actually quite "user friendly," just what level of baby-sitting does Family Friendly Libraries really expect?
2. This book makes drug use look extremely unappetizing, and should discourage (heavy) drug use in anyone who reads it. Should we ban any accurate account of the consequences of illicit behavior?
3. Family Friendly Libraries also challenged the book, "The Chocolate War" by Robert Cormier. Because it's title contained the word chocolate, they reasoned, young children may be attracted to the book, which is also a "coming of age" novel appropriate for teens. Perhaps our local legislators will introduce legislation requiring book titles to accurately reflect the topic of the book! They might call it the "Anti-Ironic Title Act of 1998"?
4. Family Friendly Libraries promoted Library Board member Scott Scoggins' "Contract with Gwinnett," which would have eliminated from the library any books with nude pictures, sexually explicit language, "material of such a nature that a parent's right to control what their children learn is violated" (including any on the topics of parenting, child abuse, sex education, counseling, abortion,) and "material which may encourage violation of state or federal law." It was estimated at the time that these criteria would eliminate most of the materials in the library-do we now ban any books of "a violent nature" which may be "deadly" in the hands of a maladjusted individual? Let's start with murder mysteries, thrillers, the Bible....
[posted July 3, 1998]
Join Refuse
& Resist!
From: skip evans
Subject: Library Censorship
Americans United for Separation of Church and State Atlanta Chapter
305 Madison Ave., Suite 1166, New York, NY 10165
Phone: 212-713-5657
email: info@refuseandresist.org