Louisiana Voice

Hollywood has made a career of giving us the put-upon person who in the end, turns the tables on the bully and kicks some serious ass.

One of the last persons you’d expect to fill that role would be a quiet librarian in a middle school in Livingston Parish.

But Amanda Jones has had enough of the trash talk from self-righteous loudmouth Michael Lunsford who seems to have nothing better to do with his time than to pick on female librarians, be they in a Livingston Parish middle school or in a public library in Lafayette.

Lunsford, the self-appointed guardian of public morals has taken it upon himself to goad his followers to attack Amanda Jones on social media, depicting her to be some kind of subversive monster bent on turning our children into homosexuals.

In other words, he has a dirty mind and as the old computer adage goes, garbage in, garbage out.

Not coincidentally, it’s the same strategy employed by people like Newt Gingrich, Matt Gaetz, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Ron Johnson, Gym Jordan, Rand Paul, John Kennedy, and a host of other like-minded political hacks who, lacking legitimate arguments, resort to character assassination and outright lies.

In legal parlance, it’s called defamation. Another word for it is libel.

And when Jones, whose sin was speaking out in opposition to censorship of libraries and of Lunsford and his so-called Citizens for a New Louisiana group, came under a withering attack of lies, inuendo, and accusations of being a pedophile, she began a drive to raise funds to finance the legal costs of going after Lunsford and one of his cohorts, Ryan Thames.

I won’t divulge the amount of money she has raised, but I can tell you it was a significant amount – most likely enough to take the fight to Lunsford and Thames in a defamation and harassment LAWSUIT filed against the two last Wednesday.

Lunsford is president of something called Citizens for a New Louisiana. Thames is a Livingston Parish resident who operates a Facebook page under the alias Bayou State of Mind – and hit behind that cowardly moniker to launch anonymous attacks against Jones. Jones is president of the LOUISIANA ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOL LIBRARIANS and also was Louisiana’s co-librarian of the year for 2021.

Among the ABSURDITIES Jones was hit with on social media included claims she was grooming kindergarten children to be gay and that lightning struck her school (apparently some kind of sign from God), causing part of the school to be destroyed by fire.

Well, first of all, she is librarian at a school that teaches fifth- and sixth-graders exclusively. No kindergartners there. Second, the lightning strike was at Live Oak Junior High, a couple of miles from Live Oak Middle School where she is librarian.

And those were just the nice things they said about her.

There are several words that come to mind when the names Michael Lunsford, Ryan Thames, or Citizens for a New Louisiana come up. Despicable, reprehensible, disgusting, repulsive, repugnant, libelous, defamatory, sick, and nauseating are just a few.

And it’s a clear reflection of what’s happening in this country. Where once two sides could sit down and discuss – even debate – issues without resorting to attacks on one’s character.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has a new book called The Destructionists. In that book, he notes that at one time the two major political parties – Republicans and Democrats – could consider each other as opponents – but not enemies.

Then Gingrich and C-SPAN arrived in Congress the same year – 1979. The face of public discourse changed radically after that. Knowing the C-SPAN camera showed only a closeup of the speaker and not the empty House chamber, Gingrich began carpet-bombing fellow members with his incendiary rhetoric.

It was so bad that then-House Speaker Tip O’Neill, in a furious response, said of the brash Georgian, “You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House and challenged these people and you challenged their Americanism, and it is the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress.”

But then Tip had not encountered an orange-haired egotistical grifter named Trump. Gringrich, if anything, was encouraged to step up his attacks with dog-whistle words like “battle,” “war,” “Fight,” “crooks,” “traitors,” and similar rhetoric designed to stir his constituency to a fever pitch. Continuing the practice were people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and more recently, Alex Jones.

That, sadly, is the sorry state to which political discourse has sunken. That’s where we find ourselves today and you can see and hear it in state legislators and now all the way down to parish councils and library boards.

Is this really what we want now? Where kids’ football game where an argument between coaches morphs into gunfire? Where we never know when we send our children off to school if they’ll come home alive?

Lunsford and his ilk are so terrified that “gay” might rub off on straight kids if they read these awful books. Can it really be so bad that the State of Florida actually banned four math text books because of objectionable content? Math?

Two of the books to which Lunsford objected are This Book is Gay and The V-Word. (Perhaps he thought the latter title was his unauthorized biography.)

At any rate, maybe he would be wise to touch base with Alex Jones to get some pointers on formulating a good defense for Jones’s lawsuit.