Louisiana Voice

MEMO

To:         Every single parish, university, and public school library in Louisiana

From:    Michael Lunsford

               President, Citizens for a New Louisiana, and alleged author,

               Radical Right-Wing Repugnantcans,

               And self-serving demagogues

Message:           

We’re coming for your books, your meetings, and your jobs. If we have to destroy your reputation to accomplish our objective, we will not hesitate to do so. We have no principles or delusions of decency.

Strong? Perhaps. Offensive? Maybe. Accurate? Absolutely.

He has already managed to stack the Lafayette Parish Board of Control (“control” being the key word here) and he’s set his sights on Livingston Parish. His is a campaign being carried out, ironically, in the name of decency. It’s anything but decent, as evidenced by the personal attack on middle school librarian in Livingston Parish, Amanda Jones:

Something tells me you’d better be able to prove this. The alternative is you would be wise to lawyer up. Libel can be an expensive lesson.

Probably wouldn’t have too much influence on that 6-year-old kindergartner since Amanda Jones works at Live Oak Middle School. It’s a math thing; you wouldn’t understand.

Uh, just for the record, genius, wrong school. The gymnasium at Live Oak Junior High was hit by lightning and was destroyed by the ensuing fire. “This woman,” as you so dismissively referred to her, is the librarian at Live Oak Middle School, a couple of miles away. Get your damn facts straight before you go shooting off your bigoted, misinformed mouth.

Make no mistake. Michael Lunsford is on a campaign of censorship and he won’t stop until he’s smeared, libeled, and besmirched every librarian who stands in his way and he may well be coming to your parish, your school, your university next.

And he’s got money – and the Repugnantcan Party – behind him in his efforts.

What kind of reptilian, slithering, lowlife would attack a person he doesn’t even know, probably has never met, like this?

I’ll tell you who. A coward who doesn’t even have the courage to attach his name to his libelous attacks. He hides behind anonymity in his online defamations while putting on an angelic demeanor in public.

He is, in short, your typical Repugnantcan operative, sticking his nose into people’s lives in such as manner as to be as disruptive, as destructive, and as vile as possible while carrying out his vulturous campaign.

For more on Lunsford and his organization, go HERE to read the thorough work of journalist for the Lafayette publication The Current, by Leslie Turk.

Lunsford got shot down in Livingston Parish last week but rest assured, he’ll be back. His kind don’t take no for an answer and they’re persistent to the point of being more than a little nauseating.

Yesterday, in Lafayette, the Library Board of Control, appropriately “controlled” by Lunsford’s handpicked appointees, attempted to fire head librarian Cara Chance but the board, headed by President Robert Judge who was obviously in over his head when it came to conducting a controversial meeting, withered under the protest of a crowd of a roomful of Chance supporters.

Judge, read a two-page opening statement (which he neglected to make available to attendees or the media) that was difficult to hear in the back of the room. But he took a shot at the reporting of the Acadiana Advocate (sister publication to the Baton Rouge Advocate), which he described as “inaccurate, as usual.” When a public official says something like that, it generally means the reporter has scored a direct hit.

What Judge was going to such lengths to deny was that Chance was being considered for termination over her resistance to banning objectionable books. It was, he said, for insubordination, for which board member David Pitre, in the most indignant manner he could muster, declared he had no patience for. Well, bully for him. Apparently, he had all the patience in the world for Judge’s misdirection and obfuscation.

Because, make no mistake, this was all about censorship. The insubordination charge, which surfaced only minutes before the meeting started, was pure and unadulterated B.S.

This was a power play with Lunsford’s fingerprints all over it. And this wannabe powerbroker doesn’t even reside in Lafayette Parish – he lives in St. Martin, not that any of that matters to him.

Backed by local property managers Will Mills, III, Jeremiah Supple, and attorney Steven Durio (Durio’s name cropped up in my book Murder on the Teche, about the 2010 murder of New Iberia orthodontist Dr. Robert Chastant), Lunsford and his Citizens for a New Louisiana, managed to defeat a critical school tax proposal back in 2017 and a library tax the following year.

Interesting name for his group, considering there’s little “new” about the same old power politics of Louisiana where those with the bucks manage to roll over everyone else.

Did I mention that Mills and Supple are property managers? Could it be honest convictions and pure intentions that moved them to support Lunsford’s opposition to the library tax or could it have been some underlying reason like say, the defeat of any tax would lower the taxes on their property holdings? Nah, that couldn’t be it.

The self-appointed guardians of all that is decent are hell-bent on protecting our young-uns from the evils of the flesh by not allowing them access to those sinful books that dare mention the existence of gays or even the mention of sex or (gawd forbid) satanic or (gasp) critical race theory.

Critical race theory? Hell, we can’t be teaching kids about how their granddaddies hurled insults and even rocks at little black kids who just wanted to go to a decent school with bathrooms that worked and classrooms that were heated in winter. We can’t let them know our police turned vicious dogs loose on blacks and that college students (also our forebears) poured milkshakes over their heads at the lunch counter. So, let’s keep books like Ruby Bridges Goes to School and Martin Luther King and the March on Washington the hell outta our liberries. (Ruby Bridges integrated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960.)

Lunsford, obviously encouraged over the success of defeating the library tax quickly immersed himself in another controversy the following year over a proposed themed Story Time at the library and managed to kill that project as well. The ACLU entered the picture over that s**t storm and won a lawsuit against the parish, which only served to further enflame Lunsford and his buddies.

Citizens for a New Louisiana managed to block a Black History presentation after Lunsford, through the Parish Council, managed to stack the Library Board of Control with his group’s lap dogs, who took things a step further by banning any theme display at the library.

That’s when Chance insubornated (we’ll pretend that’s a real word) herself by daring to erect a display that included the mention of gay marriage and the board went bananas, popping a blood vessel or two or three in the process.

It attempted to get Library Director Danny Gillane to axe Chance, but Gillane went on vacation or abstained or something and punted to the board which called yesterday’s meeting.

Here’s the real irony that many in attendance seemed to miss:

Chance was scheduled for major surgery today (Tuesday, July 26) and asked the board to delay Monday’s meeting until she recovered well enough to participate. It summarily refused.

But on Monday, when it came to facing down an angry crowd that was in no mood for chicanery on the part of the board, it cratered like a soggy paper cup and voted to defer action until next month, thereby delaying action on the board’s terms and not for any courtesy shown Chance.

And Lunsford? Well, he was a no-show.

As for Amanda Jones at Live Oak Middle School? She ain’t taking the crap thrown at her lying down.

She has filed criminal complaints against Lunsford and Ryan Thames, that “anonymous” person who posted his hit piece under the clever moniker Bayou State of Mind.

That’s exactly what it’s going to take – fighting back. These slugs cannot be allowed to attack decent people with impunity. Alex Jones of Infowars is learning that lesson as I write this. He is in court in Austin, Texas, right now to defend a defamation lawsuit over his idiotic claim that the victims of Sandy Hook were actors. If there’s a shred of just remaining in this world, he should lose his shirt – and baggy pants.

As for libraries featuring books about gays and CRT, I will take the latter issue first. The fight for equal rights is part of this country’s history. It’s legitimate to have kids learn about it. The very idea of one man “owning” another is repulsive and repugnant. Yet this country condoned it, even to the point of considering a black as a fraction of a man. Talk about hypocrites. Whites refused to acknowledge blacks as equals but allowed, no required, black nannies to nurse white babies and while slave owners fathered children by black slave women.

I can see where some would not want kids to learn that part. I understand why we wouldn’t want our children to know that our ancestors practiced such double standards. The truth hurts.

If you don’t already know, I am steadfastly against censorship in any form. If marijuana is supposed to be a “gateway” to harder drugs, then censorship is no less a gateway to further erosion of our basic freedoms. It’s guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and is every bit as important as the Second Amendment. Never forget that. If you don’t like a book, then damnit, don’t read it. It’s that simple. If your kid isn’t gay, he isn’t gonna read gay literature. If he is gay, you ain’t gonna change him by banning some book. Get that through your head, Lunsford.

As for gays and porn in the libraries? Has Lunsford ever heard of the Internet or cell phones? Kids today send nude photos of themselves to the opposite sex over their Smart Phones and they can get all the internet smut they can handle with the click of a mouse.

And to tell you the truth, I’ll bet you some of those morality marshals have taken a peek or two at a few online porn pages themselves.

I will be having more on this subject, I promise you.