Be forewarned, all those of you who would be so brazen as to dare check a publication from your local library that so much as hints at sexuality, sexual orientation or gender identity.
They’re coming for your books.
But more than your books, they’re really coming for your freedom.
Those self-appointed guardians of morality and decency now have the public libraries of Rapides Parish in their crosshairs.
They’ve already encroached on public libraries in Caddo, Bossier, Livingston, Lafayette, St. Tammany, and other parishes in their crusade to purge books they deem objectionable – by their standards, of course. By their standards alone.
A newly-appointed member of the Rapides Parish Library Board has added an item to tomorrow’s (Tuesday, December 13) board meeting agenda to call for the altering of the library’s collection development policy “to exclude children’s and teen books that include references to sexuality, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”
The meeting will be held at the Westside Regional Branch of the parish library at 3:30 p.m.
But it’s not about children’s books. It never was.
Let me pause a minute right here and say to you that if you are not pissed off at the efforts of the ultra-right-wing Citizens for a New Louisiana for their firing the first salvo in what is being set up as an all-out attack on the First Amendment, then you damn well should be. This is an issue well worth gearing up for an all-or-nothing battle.
And all you hunters (yes, gun-lovers, I’ll play your game here), take heed. If the First Amendment falls, can the Second Amendment be that far behind?
And that’s not a rhetorical question.
Citizens for a New Louisiana, headed up by a guy named Michael Lunsford of St. Martin Parish, is tied to the National Republican Party and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (coincidentally, also from St. Martin) who, incidentally, is an announced candidate for governor in 2023. The group is heavily financed by the National Republican Party which has as its agenda an ambitious plan for the dismantling of many rights that we now take for granted.
First, they stacked the Supreme Court (you do remember how they pulled that off, don’t you, by blocking the first vacancy because of a pending presidential election and then rushing the second through after the election was over but before a Democratic president could take office). The new court then lost no time ripping a woman’s right over her own body from her. Done.
The next step was to launch a systematic assault on two fronts: one being an attack on education curriculum and something called critical race theory (CRT), and the so-called objectional content of public and school libraries.
Basically, our Republican political leadership does not want African-American children to learn how they (the current Republican political leadership – and a certain NFL team owner) fought so hard to prevent those children’s grandparents from having the same access to a quality education as those Republican political leaders – and a certain NFL team owner. That’s the CRT they’re so paranoid about.
Citizens for a New Louisiana isn’t going to stop at ridding library shelves of LGBTQ books. That is not their ultimate goal at all. Never was.
And they won’t stop at banning books about race, the civil rights struggle, and the Civil War.
Nor will they stop at banning books about history that puts this country in a less than favorable light – things like Vietnam, Watergate, corporate and Wall Street greed and the recessions and depressions that greed brought about.
And they certainly won’t stop at eradicating books that tell of the environmental destruction we’ve brought upon ourselves – again, fostered by greed that gave not a thought of the future.
They won’t stop at banning books about women’s suffrage, equal pay for women, and the history of Roe v. Wade.
They won’t stop at eliminating any books that tell of the growing pay inequities that have grown exponentially over the past several decades, or the inequality of pay for women who perform the same jobs as men.
And you can bet they won’t stop at trashing science books that conflict with evangelicals’ Old Testament beliefs.
They won’t stop at any of these pursuits until there won’t be any books – or libraries, for that matter – for them to worry about or to protest.
You may think I’m being an alarmist or a conspiracy theorist, but I’m afraid history is on my side in this argument. All you have to do is look at 1930s’ Germany or any other suppressive society like Iran, Russia, China, or North Korea for your evidence.
When we allow a few self-righteous moralists to set the standards for behavior – Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has already hinted at the possibility of the court banning contraceptives – and to usurp the US Constitution, there will be no going back. To repeat a time worn cliché, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
The time to stop this insane movement is right now, before it can gain any more momentum. There needs to be a large turnout at tomorrow’s meeting to tell Citizens for a New Louisiana to go pound sand up their collective asses.
These people constitute a clear and present danger.
If you control information, you control the agenda. If you control the agenda, you control the people. If you control the people, there is no freedom.
It’s that simple.
Louisiana Voice 
Our society is proving it learns nothing from history because it chooses to ignore or change the parts it doesn’t like at the moment to suit its knee-jerk needs.
Tom, if their attempts were not so ludicrous in this day and age of the internet and all its available materials (sexual and otherwise) I might normally find it funny. But after seeing these past six or seven years of t-rump and his sycophant’s coming so close to costing us ALL of our freedoms, it is no laughing matter.
Great article and comment! However, we must NOT become THEM. The ultra right will fail but they will never go away. Thus, neither will WE.! Keep learning and keep loving. ron thompson (go Top Gun, that generation of our military is providing leadership) thanks ron thompson
What a sad state we are in. It would still be bad but not so bad if these were true grass roots movements, but these folks have no original thoughts, except that they are against something. They have to rely on others (and who knows who these others are) to articulate their thoughts and the strategies to combat whatever they are against, rather like all the copy-and-paste comments on Facebook that my right-wing friends are so fond of posting. Legislatures rely on outside groups to write laws about gun control and abortion. Wacko groups can go on the internet for advice on how to take over a school board or library board. It’s all about how to subvert the process. Their willingness to use violence as a means to an end makes them all the more dangerous.
Our country may never recover from this strife.
Not to mention the deeper cultural divide happening thanks to people like this. These white Christian nationalists are creating many pockets of society that are undesirable and unwelcoming for most. No wonder in general the bluer an area is the more expensive it is to move there. Over time people will continue to move from these backwards moving states and localities rather than move to them-refugees from ’Merica.