Louisiana Voice

Sometimes the best-laid plans go KA-BOOM! in your face.

A few years ago, Louisiana legislator Valerie Hodges pushed through a bill giving state aid to faith-based schools, the intent being that only Christian schools would qualify. Later, when an Islamic school in New Orleans applied for the state aid, her head nearly exploded.

Now, it’s happened again and if it becomes a trend, the collective heads of evangelicals everywhere will likewise will morph into living landmines. They might even resort to desperate measures, like slashing the budgets of public libraries in the apparent hopes of eventually starving them out of existence (see story below).

You see, even as schools in Oklahoma are distributing Bibles to students to be used in the state’s mandated education curriculum, one school district in Texas has reacted quite differently to the ridiculously idiotic concept that public libraries should be closely monitored with the intent of banning objectionable books.

The CANYON INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT decided, albeit temporarily, to comply with House Bill (HB) 900, aka the Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources (READERS) Act.

Accordingly, according to an email from school district Superintendent Darryl Flusche, the “standard for library content prohibits books that have one instance of sexual content…Therefore, HB900 doesn’t allow numerous books, including the full text of the Bible, to be available in the school library.”

Flusche subsequently CRATERED to public pressure and the Bible was reinstated. But its brief ban certainly focused the bright light of hypocrisy and double standards on the hysteria that has accompanied Republicans’ sudden outrage over book content. It also – or should have – reminded us of the book burnings (along with attacks on the media, women’s rights, civil rights, and even freedom of speech) that invariably mark the beginnings of any tyrannical rule.

And make no mistake, there are more than enough LURID STORIES AND VERSES in the Bible to make a hardened sailor blush. They include adultry, incest, bestiality, and graphic violence to women and children.

But woe unto the unfortunate librarian who stocks To Kill a Mockingbird in the library shelves.

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The controversy surrounding the Livingston Parish Library, initiated by the unsolicited influence of a morals monitor named Michael Lunsford and his Citizens for a New Louisiana, has taken a much darker and more subtle and sinister turn at the hands of the library’s Board of Control.

And if you think events occurring in Livingston Parish don’t concern you, think again. Lunsford and his outfit have placed every parish and school library in the state in its crosshairs and it’ only a matter of time before similar tactics are employed where you live.

What am I talking about? Budget cuts. Not just routine belt-tightening, but the choking kind of cuts designed to eventually strangle our ability to enjoy the services of our local libraries.

Without elaborating, here are some of the cuts proposed by the Livingston Parish Library Board of Control:

• A 92 percent cut in advertising? All advertising accomplishes is the encouragement of people to read, to become more educated and enlightened. To slash this line item is to unconditionally endorse Donald Trump’s asinine “I love the poorly educated” pronouncement.
• Likewise, a 93 percent cut in marketing and promotions tells us that the library board would like Livingston Parish to revert to the backwater reputation it has worked so hard to overcome.
• Why would the board suggest a 62.5 percent cut in emergency repairs? This mentality smacks of the state’s abysmal performance in keeping physical plants on our college and university campuses inhabitable and functional.
• Summer reading cut by 83 percent? Well, let’s just drop all pretense and shoot for the state’s lowest literacy rate.
• In keeping with that goal, let’s just eliminate all funding for the digital library, adult literacy and the literary club. Oh, they did, didn’t they?

While we’re at it, let’ take a look up the local food chain. While members of the library board serve without pay, their appointing authority, the members of the Livingston Parish Council, do not. The maximum pay allowable under state law is $800 per month. Members of the Livingston Parish Council are paid…you guessed it, $800 per month.

With nine council members, that comes to $7,200 per month, or $86,400 per year. Why don’t we just lop a few dollars off their salary, say, to $100 per month. That would represent to a yearly savings of $75,600.

The Livingston Parish School Board is a bit more secretive in that there is no information online that reveals what they make. In fact, when you google it, you get this: “There isn’t much information about how much members of the Livingston Parish School Board get paid…”

But for the sake of argument, let’s assume they get at least $500 per month. With nine members, that’s $4,500 per month or $54,000 per year. So, let’s reduce their pay to $100 per month as well, bringing that down to $10,800 for a minimum savings of $43,200. That’s an overall savings of $115,800 for the two agencies.

I mean, if we’re gonna talk austerity, let’s make it an across-the-board proposition. After all, the members of the parish council and school board are supposed to be performing a public service, not using their positions as a second job.

What makes all this even worse is that there is not an original thought in this entire process. The furor over libraries in general is the result of some self-anointed protector of one person’s concept of decency and respectability. Not only is he probably ignorant of Chaucer, but he’d likely be outraged at the farting scene in Blazing Saddles. I have to assume that Michael Lundsford does not subscribe to television streaming services so as not to be exposed to such degenerate entertainment fare.

No one ever gave libraries a thought until some Republican morals policeman decided to make it an issue and then just like those who echoed Trump’s “witch hunt,” “fake news,” “stop the steal,” and various other catch phrases, mindless hordes just followed the noise, never stopping to think for themselves.

And folks, if they can come for the libraries, the books, the teachers and for control of decisions about women’s bodies, it’s only a matter of time before they come for our social security, our Medicare, our rights as workers (child labor, elimination of benefits, etc.), and our very freedom of speech – all of which will ultimately result in an ever-widening income disparity

And I’m not saying all this as a “never Trumper.” It’s already gone way beyond Trump. Just look around you and the other “leaders.” The Landrys, the Scalises, the Johnsons, the Musks, and the list grows each day. These are the people controlling our lives and they’ll be here long after Trump is gone unless we unite to defend women’s rights, civil rights, LGBQT rights, and the rights of every marginalized individual.

And the ultimate irony is that they’re doing all this in the name of freedom and Christianity – because those dog whistles resonate with us.

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Livingston Parish school librarian Amanda Jones is going to the Sundance Film Festival.

Or rather, the story of her struggles with would-be censors is going to be the subject of a documentary scheduled to debut at next year’s Sundance Festival.

In case you do not remember, Amanda is one of those rare people who have the courage to stand up and say “ENOUGH!” to those self-appointed morality police who want ban books that they most likely have never read but instead, just parrot what someone who is not even from Livingston Parish says we should do.

Amanda’s fight against the book burners drew the attention of OPRAH WINFREY who gave her a shout out at the National Book Awards back in November of 2023. Amanda’s battle was also chronicled by NBC News, The Hill, Education Week, The Independent, The American Library Association, NPR, Huffpost, The New York Times, Library Journal, Education Leader Diane Ravitch’s blog and the Baton Rouge Advocate.

She also has written a book titled That Librarian, which tells the sad story of how she stood up to censorship and of the price she and her family have paid psychologically from the threats and insults hurled at them by people who know better but still choose to act out their bigotry.

She held a packed-house BOOK SIGNING back in August and accompanying our story of that event was an interesting list of book titles that the extremists would ban from the Livingston Parish Library. The Grapes of Wrath? Really? All the King’s Men (written by LSU professor Robert Penn Warren)? Of Mice and Men? To Kill a Mockingbird? Here’s a more comprehensive list of proposed bans:

• Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
• Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
• Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
• Charlotte’s Webb, by E.B. White
• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
• The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
• 1984, by George Orwell
• The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
• Animal Farm, by Geore Orwell
• The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
• As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
• A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
• Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
• The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
• All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
• In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
• The Naked and he Dead, by Norman Mailer
• An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser

But back to the Sundance Film Festival – because it’s a pretty big thing.

Sarah Jessica Parker, the actress from the Sex and the City TV series (can we even say that with all the decency police watching?), is the executive producer for the documentary entitled The Librarians.

Amanda is to be the central character in the film but like the other librarians featured, will not be paid for her appearance. “It’s empowering to me,” she told the Baton Rouge Advocate, “but it’s also daunting.” She said the film will reveal the told placed on her reputation and on her family. “I don’t think people realize the attacks that I’ve been under,” she said. “I get to tell the truth about what happened to me on this documentary…”

The Sundance Film Festival kicks off on January 23 and The Librarians will premiere on January 24 in Park City, Utah. Following its debuts in the film festival circuit, it is expected to be made available to a major streaming platform such as Netflix, Prime or Hulu.

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Some readers may be aware that I am currently editing for publication a book about wrongful convictions in Louisiana. Appropriately titled 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana, the book examines 101 cases in which persons were convicted and sentenced to prison terms for crimes they did not commit. In many of the cases, the individuals spent decades behind bars, their lives literally ripped away from them before being exonerated.

Why were they finally exonerated after all that time? In most cases, an organization called the Innocence Project of New Orleans took up their causes and found exculpatory evidence that prosecutors and/or police had withheld from the defense at their trials – evidence beneficial to the accused, but never revealed.

Why would a prosecutor or a law enforcement officer go to such lengths to convict an innocent person while leaving the guilty perpetrator free to inflict more harm on society?

Simply put, some of those in positions of authority are just plain evil.

The same could be said of certain religious leaders, which brings up a second book I am in the process of writing. No title has been selected as yet, but I can say it is a work of historical fiction about child sex trafficking.

Historical fiction, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, is a work that draws on actual events, even citing some of them in the context of telling a fictional story. Figuring prominently in this work are leaders of both Protestant and Catholic churches.

When a minister engages in sexual relations with a child, it’s not only illegal, but it’s sick. But in many of the cases involving Protestant ministers (when the activity is discovered) it is the underage girl, the victim, who must stand before the congregation and apologize for tempting the good reverend.

In the Catholic Church, the victim is most often a pubescent boy and before the national scandal broke wide open, beginning in 1984 in Lafayette, the Catholic hierarchy reacted by requiring the victim, the pre-teen boy, to “confess his sins” as an act of contrition in order to obtain absolution.

Since 1984, the church has been forced by a rash of lawsuits from Boston to Los Angeles and points between, including, of course, New Orleans, to face the ugly truth: Too many degenerate priests have too easy access to too many young boys.

The consequences have been steep: more than $5 billion – and counting – in damages paid out to victims That figure could double given recent lookback laws that have given victims more time to file claims through litigation.

That’s why I kinda raised my eyebrows in skepticism recently when I read story in the right-wing GATEWAY PUNDIT that said the Vatican is “teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.”

The thing that really sparked my disbelief was the reason cited for the so-called financial crisis.

“Donations from churches and individual believers have dwindled as traditionalists express frustration with the Vatican’s drift toward secular progressivism,” the article said, adding that donations have dropped because many Catholics were unhappy with the “progressive reforms” of Pope Francis.

First of all, no one knows within light years what the true financial condition of the Roman Catholic Church is because the Vatican’s ledger is a closely-held secret. The best-guess estimate is around $73 billion in assets, including churches, cathedrals, monasteries, schools, convents, museums, embassies, 177 million acres of land, including farms and forests, throughout the world, gold, works of art and stockholdings which alone are estimated at $1.6 billion in value.

The Vatican is a sovereign country with its own bank and they ain’t talking. For more on this subject, I suggest you read the outstanding Jason Berry book Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church.

The New Orleans Archdiocese alone owns more than $1 billion in property, including real estate, jewelry and other holdings.

But my point here is that while donations may be down, and while the Vatican may well have had an operating deficit of $87 million in 2023, representing a $5.3 million increase from the 2022 deficit, progressive reforms had little to do with the drop in donations – or at least a lesser impact than reported.

Conversely, I would suggest the Catholic Church’s refusal to face the reality of sex abuse of children by its priests and the protection of those priests by bishops and archbishops was a bigger factor in the fiscal difficulties.

And just how were the offending priests protected? Simple. As soon as complaints started about a priest, he would be moved to another parish – where he could continue sexually abusing children – different children. At worst, the priest would be shipped off to some nice rehab center for a while until the furor died down and upon completion of said rehab, he would again be reassigned to a different parish.

Pull from parish, reassign, repeat.

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The sordid story of sexual abuse of children by officials of the Roman Catholic Church continues to grow with seemingly new revelations each day. Many of the stories are rooted in the manner in which leaders in the New Orleans Archdiocese failed to recognize the magnitude of the scandal that now seems to be growing exponentially.

The first lawsuit against the church over sexual abuse of altar boys originated in Lafayette with the alleged assaults of Father Gilbert Gauthe. From there, the lawsuits began popping up all over the country’s landscape like so many wildfires. Just today, The Guardian writer Ramon Vargas revealed that Gauthe and Lawrence Hecker, who just last week entered a guilty plea to sex crimes against juveniles, literally shared one unfortunate victim.

In 1992, Father Gerard Howell and his brother, Father Rodney Howell, were accused of molesting dozens of students at a school for the deaf as early as the 1960s and 1970s.

Let that sink in. They were credibly accused of sexual molestation of deaf children.

Gerard Howell has an interesting HISTORY OF ASSIGNMENTS by the church. Ordained in 1964, he was promptly assigned to St. Lawrence the Martyr in Kenner and Metairie.

He was there two years before being transferred to St. Henry’s in New Orleans before being transferred again in 1967, this time to SS Peter and Paul in New Orleans. To this point, every assignment had been to a parish with a school with both male and female students.

In 1971, he was moved again, this time to St. Ann National Shrine in New Orleans where he remained for three years.

In 1974, he was again on the move, this time to Holy Trinity in New Orleans. He stayed there for three years before taking a year of sick leave in 1977.

He returned to duty in 1978 when he was assigned to St. Francis de Sales Catholic Deaf Center in Baton Rouge where he remained until 1981 when he was sent to the House of Affirmation in Whittinsville, Massachusetts, an indication that all was not good in the priest’s career at that time.

The House of Affirmation was a treatment facility for priests with psychological and psychosexual problems.

Unbelievably, he was returned to duty in 1982 when he was assigned to Our Lady of Prompt Succor in Westwego, a parish with a school with 700 students. In 1983, he was sent to Prince of Peace in Chalmette where he remained until 1986 when he was placed on leave until 1992, when accusations were leveled against him and his brother Rodney charging that they had sexually abused dozens of deaf children in the 1970s.

Rodney never had to answer to the charges since he had died the year before the accusations surfaced.

When U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Meredith Grabill ordered in 2020 that retirement benefits for priests accused of child abuse be halted, it was  ARCHBISHOP GREGORY AYMOND who helped him get around the court order so that his benefit payments might continue.

It would be bad enough if Gauthe, Hecker and the Howell brothers were the only cases involving sexual abuse of children by Catholic officials. Sadly, that is not the case.

Joseph Sullivan was named Baton Rouge’s bishop in 1974 and had a reputation of taking a hard line, to the point of excommunication of any Catholic who consented to, participated in or offered advice on abortion. He was, however, sued by three individuals who claim that Sullivan abused them. One of the lawsuits was settled for $225,000 in 2009. Three years prior to that, the diocese settled another lawsuit related to Sullivan. Terms of that settlement were sealed but the name of Bishop Sullivan High School was soon changed to St. Michael the Archangel.

Christopher Springer worked in no fewer than six Baton Rouge-area church parishes and while court filings have remained under seal, it is known that at least 30 people filed lawsuits against him for the alleged rapes of altar boys in the Baton Rouge area from 1968 to 1980.

Springer was probably the most prolific abuser in the Diocese of Baton Rouge with a victim count well above 30, according to an attorney who has filed multiple abuse lawsuits against him. Like Gerard Howell, Springer knew sign language, often worked in deaf communities and would even sign at Mass. Altar boys alleged that he would bring them to a camp and abuse them at a trailer in Clinton. In a 2009 sworn statement, Springer wrote that he had met with then-Baton Rouge Bishop Stanley Ott in 1984, and Ott had recommended he go to a facility for troubled priests in Florida.

THERE WERE OTHERS, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, for Catholic leaders like Archbishop Aymond to try and claim the high ground by professing their ignorance of the events that were taking place under their collective noses.

As is always the case, the crime is bad but the attempted coverup is worse.

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