There’s an old, time-worn expression that goes back to far no one knows its precise origins:
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
That is sage advice. Bert Lance, the director of the Office of Management and Budget in Jimmy Carter’s administration certainly embraced that philosophy when he said, “…That’s the trouble with government: fixing things that aren’t broken and not fixing thing that are broken.”
Perhaps, in the minds of some people, quoting someone from the Carter administration might not be the best example. He was, after all, the president of gas rationing, double-digit inflation and a failed rescue attempt in the Iranian desert. On the other hand, Carter never boasted about grabbing women by their genitals, he didn’t use his office to enrich himself or his family, he was married just once (though he did once admit to lust in his heart), and he held himself forth as the kind of leader who could be trusted. Yes, his presidency was not what Americans would’ve desired, but he was undercut by an actor named Reagan who had his own eye on the Oval Office.
Citizens for a New Louisiana, its director, Michael Lunsford, and a few library board around the state could certainly do well to adapt that slogan for themselves but like the typical bureaucratic paper shuffler, they just can’t seem to come to that realization.
Take the Livingston Parish Library Board of Control, for example. We had a functioning board until the Livingston Parish Council, goaded on by Lunsford and his organization, began to think they were better qualified to run a library system than those who obtain Master’s degrees to do just that.
So, with the subtly of elephants making baby elephants, the parish council and Lunsford waded into the fray, shook up the existing library board, replacing members with political hacks instead of dedicated public servants.
And to borrow another familiar phrase, no good deed goes unpunished. We now have a dysfunctional library board that is ruled by chaos and chaired by an individual who knows nothing about procedure and we are now looking for a fourth director of our library system in a three-year period because our third just resigned after being in the position just since the second week in January.
Parish councils and police juries also attempted to interfere with the operations of libraries, ostensibly over the availability of inappropriate books to children but really over a single word: control. That’s all the Lunsford crowd ever wanted.
And as for his organization: Citizens for a New Louisiana sounds suspiciously like a cleaned-up version of the old John Birch Society or a couple of other outfits from my high school and college days. They had nice names, too, like H.L. Hunt’s Lifeline and Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade. Of course, Hargis fell far and fast in 1976 when it was learned that a newlywed couple, students at his Tulsa-based American Christin College, decided confession was good for the soul and revealed to each other that each had had sex with the good minister.
But never mind all that. The objective is to keep those nasty books out of the hands of the children and to keep them damn crossdressing drag queens from grooming kids (though I could rattle off a couple hundred names of priests, Baptist preachers and church counselors who have been caught “grooming” kids for themselves).
Louisiana Voice 
This is hardly surprising, given the location. While Livingston Parish likes to pretend it’s gotten past its ignorant, Klan-supporting reputation, too many of its residents never gave up any of that.
Attempted censorship always works in reverse. I remember when silly EBRP DA Ossie Brown went after the movie, “Life of Brian” as inappropriate for younger viewers, suddenly it became the most popular movie in town. People who’d never heard of it and people who were never interested in seeing it suddenly headed straight to the theaters to see it.
As for anything with sexual content, fundamentalist religious nuts have long been among the worst when it comes to trying to tamp down something only to find it not only made younger people more curious, but the very adults who fixated on it as a subject to be censored, were quite often among the worst of twisted perverts behind closed doors. Jimmy Swaggart’s own antics taught them nothing. We already know plenty about Catholic priests and their victims.
Banned books survive and thrive, and often the fact that they were banned is what made them more popular than they might have been otherwise.
Incompetent people do often succeed in ruining local institutions, though, and that’s unfortunate. Livingston Parish residents should wake up to this and get rid of the incompetent fools on their board. Same with BREC in EBRP. There are lessons to be learned all around. People love their libraries and their parks. Too often those get undermined by a small group of people with ulterior motives, and by the time the masses figure that out, it may be too late.