Hell hath no fury like a librarian scorned in the book banning wars

[sl8]

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2024-08-22/la-et-that-librarian-book

Hell hath no fury like a librarian scorned in the book banning wars

By Jeffrey Fleishman
Staff Writer
Aug. 22, 2024 3 AM PT

Amanda Jones is a Louisiana middle-school librarian who sleeps with a shotgun under her bed and carries a pistol when she travels the back roads.

Threats against her began two years ago after she spoke out against censorship and was drawn into the culture wars over book banning. She was condemned as a pedophile and a groomer and accused of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” The Christian right targeted her, and she found herself in the news warning that conservatives in her state and across much of the country were endangering libraries and intellectual freedom.

[...]

Threats against her began two years ago after she spoke out against censorship and was drawn into the culture wars over book banning. She was condemned as a pedophile and a groomer and accused of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” The Christian right targeted her, and she found herself in the news warning that conservatives in her state and across much of the country were endangering libraries and intellectual freedom.

Jones’ cautionary and disquieting testament to the nation’s divisiveness is told in her new memoir, “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America,” a blunt, angry, searching and redeeming story about a woman engulfed by forces and designs she never imagined. It is a glimpse into a family and a small town that reads like a chapter out of “The Scarlet Letter” or “The Crucible,” narratives whose themes of fear, superstition, rage and religion are again permeating the nation’s political moment, including Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s recent comments that “Democrats want to put sexually explicit books in toddlers’ libraries.”

[...]

[Timeflyer]

1. On order at my public library, got a hold request on it. Library information technology programs will have to

incorporate course work on how to combat community interference, ignorance and violence into college programs for future librarians.

[murielm99]

2. I learned about that in my

Selection courses, a hundred years ago. The ALA should be helping more, too. My daughter feels they are not doing enough.