Louisiana Voice

Well, the lines appear to be clearly drawn, in Livingston Parish at least, over the ongoing battle over the availability of objectional literature at our libraries and so far, it’s really no contest.

A bunch of quacks, or self-appointed guardians of the moral of our youth, if you will, have taken it upon themselves to dictate morals to the rest of us heathens, sinners, and otherwise lost souls.

But those would-be censors made a big mistake. Well, two mistakes, actually. First, they turned their crusade into a personal vendetta against a middle school librarian and second, they picked on the wrong librarian.

Facebook posts by a Livingston Parish resident named Ryan Thames got nasty and then the nutcases picked up the attack and things got even nastier. Thames accused librarian Amanda Jones of trying to entice kindergarten children to the gay lifestyle and then came the smug announcement that her school had caught fire and part of it destroyed after being hit by lightning.

Jones is a middle school librarian and thus, has no contact with kindergarten children and that school? Well, that was the junior high school a couple of miles to the north of Jones’s school.

But I’ve already related that information, so I won’t beat the subject to death.

What I do want to do, however, is discuss the respective GoFundMe campaigns of Jones and Thames, the latter being one of the defendants in her defamation lawsuit she’s filed (Michael Lunsford and his Citizens for a New Louisiana are the other defendants).

Jones set as her goal $75,000 to finance her legal bills. Without being specific as to the amount raised, suffice it to say that she has easily surpassed that goal already because people opposed to censorship are, well…sane, levelheaded supporters of free expression.

Thames set as his goal $50,000 as a defense fund. To date, he’s raised a whopping $5,075, or roughly 10 percent of the total because again, people generally support the principles behind the First Amendment.

Jones’s GoFundMe campaign says, “No one should be attacked for standing up for their community or speaking out against censorship.”

I couldn’t agree more. Because, you see, that’s all she did. She appeared at a public meeting on her own time and spoke out against censorship. The result was she was immediately cast as a pariah, someone who would poison the minds of our children.

Just for defending the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

“This GoFundMe campaign is raising money to help school librarian Amanda Jones cover legal fees as she pursues protection against those who have been slandering her name after she spoke out against censorship at her local public library board meeting,” her GoFundMe page continued.  “Educators and librarians across the country are being attacked by groups taking aim at books with LGBTQ+ content and materials related to sex education for teens. This is what happened to Amanda, and she is taking a legal stand on behalf of educators.

“This could happen to any of us, and we have to take a stand.

“Give up a cup of coffee for a day and donate $5.

“Amanda has given so much of her time and energy to library and education communities. She deserves our support. Let’s show the world that librarians stick together and stand up for what is right.”

Here’s the kicker:

“Any money raised over what is needed to cover Amanda’s legal fees will be donated to EveryLibrary to continue the fight to protect others,” the online post says.

And there are others all over the map, to be sure. Efforts are underway in Lafayette Parish, Caddo Parish, and in Texas to censor libraries and to dictate to the pubic what is appropriate for intellectual consumption.

You can go HERE to see some of the contributors to Thames.

Now to boldly go where no smart man would dare go in Livingston Parish: If Thames, Lunsford, and Citizens for a New Louisiana are really serious about protecting innocent children from literature chock full of sex and unspeakable violence, they might be wise to shield the little darlings from exposure to a book called The Holy Bible.

Whoa. I said it. That’s sure to bring out the zealots with the pitchforks and torches.

But it’s true. For example, here’s a little verse from Second Kings, Chapter 18, verse 27: “Hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?”

It’s right there, in the King James Version.

And what about incest? The Good Book’s full of it, beginning in Genesis. If Adam and Eve were the first humans, how do you think their children reproduced? With their parents? Siblings?

And then there was Noah, his wife, their three sons and their wives. They were sole survivors of the flood, so how did their children’s children propagate the species? With their parents? Grandparents? Siblings? Had to be some incest going on there somewhere, sometime.

But then, incest was fairly common in the Bible. Also in Genesis, two angels first visit Lot and the neighbors come calling, wanting to have homosexual relations with the angels. Instead, Lot offers them his two virgin daughters. We’re not told if they take him up on his offer but later, after Lot and his daughters flee Sodom and hide in a cave, the two daughters get him drunk and have sex with him in order to become pregnant. How sick is that? And we’re going to let little children be exposed to that? Why, gosh-darn-it, there are Bibles placed in the backs of pews in every church in Livingston Parish just inviting little eyes to fall upon such graphic stories.

Other mentions of incest can also be found in the books of Second Chronicles, Second Samuel, Exodus, and Amos.

Then we have Abraham, Jesus Christ’s ancestor, who impregnated both his wife and his servant – after the age of 90 yet!

And look at David. He sent Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to die in battle so as to cover up his getting Bathsheba pregnant.

There are numerous instances of gruesome beheadings in the Bible, including that of JOHN THE BAPTIST on the whim of Herodias, who, by the way, was married to her own uncle (more incest). The impetus for his beheading was a dance performed by Herodias’s daughter Salome (which could explain why Baptists are supposedly opposed to dancing).

Speaking of killing people, the Bible is jam-packed with murder of all kinds, beginning with Cain killing his brother Abel. And God was the perpetrator of much of it: the flood, where he killed everyone but Noah and his family; Sodom and Gomorrah, where he killed everyone but Lot and his two oversexed daughters and continuing in Exodus where he brought a plague upon Egypt and killed the first-born of every Egyptian family. Seriously, God? Innocent babies?

Looks like Lunsford, Thames, and Citizens for a New Louisiana have their work cut out for them in cleaning up all the dirty literature in all those churches.

And trust me, they aren’t about to stop there. Anything about the Holocaust and civil rights will be in their crosshairs next. You can book that.

Better get busy, guys. You’re burning daylight.

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.

The last time Michael Lunsford’s name came up was on JULY 27 when I published my second consecutive rant about his efforts to censor libraries in Lafayette and Livingston parishes over what he perceived as efforts by the libraries to indoctrinate children in homosexuality or…

…to offer any literature containing something called critical race theory.

I had introduced his absurd contentions the day before after I attended a meeting of the milquetoast LAFAYETTE PARISH LIBRARY BOARD OF CONTROL (the key word here is “control”) which wilted in its intent to fire head librarian Cara Chance in the face of united opposition to its heavy-handed efforts to carry out Lunsford’s objectives.

Lunsford’s obvious libel of Livingston Parish middle school librarian Amanda Jones, his misspelling of the word “principle,” and his stupid blunder of implying that the lightning strike and ensuing fire at her school was some sort of message from God (wrong school, genius) aside, he plows ahead with his efforts to impose his religious and political beliefs on the rest of us.

The latest project of Lunsford, executive director of the so-called watchdog group Citizens for a New Louisiana, is to convince the University of Louisiana-Lafayette to bring in JACK POSOBIEC to speak at the university in October.

This is Lunsford’s brainchild and there’s a back story we ignore at our own risk — or at the peril of the US Constitution.

Posobiec is one of those hysterical alt-right neo-Nazis sympathizers who has never found a half-baked conspiracy theory he didn’t love. A protégé of Roger Stone and a Qanon adherent, he was a primary moving force behind the absurd “Pizzagate” B.S. that said Democratic politicians participated in a child sex ring run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria. (One idiot actually launched an attack on a pizza parlor in the misguided belief that the ridiculous story was true.)

As Earl Long once famously said of the outrageous claims by Willie Rainach and Leander Perez that integration would doom Western civilization: “You never heard such clap-trap in your life.”

Besides offering moral support and giving a platform for Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenage punk who took it upon himself to travel hundreds of miles to “defend” commercial property during a BLM protest in Knosha, Wisconsin, killing a couple of people in the process, Posobiec has pushed the oft-debunked “Stop the Steal” effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

In short, his ideas are repulsive to anyone with half a brain.

But here’s the thing:

A ULL alumnus who protested the appearance on the campus by Posobiec and others who have contacted LouisianaVoice in criticism of his appearance at the request of the campus chapter of Turning Point USA, are playing into Lunsford’s hands.

As distasteful as we may find this human garbage can of toxic political thought, we cannot on one hand lock arms in protesting efforts at censorship and on the other, demand that he not be allowed to set foot on campus.

We are still a free society, despite efforts of encroachment on that freedom (alarmingly successful in places like Texas and Florida), and the First Amendment still has meaning to real patriots.

If we insist that Posobiec be banned, Lunsford wins. It’s that simple. He can then correctly remind us that if we have that right, then he certainly would have the right to ban books he finds objectionable.

We cannot allow him that victory.

The way I see it, there are two options available to those who disagree with Posobiec (and I would fervently hope we have a huge majority on that point):

We can boycott his appearance in the hopeful anticipation that attendance will be sparse and at best, apathetically and indifferently received.

We can show up in large numbers and hoot and jeer and laugh him off the stage.

Barring him from the exercise of free speech, however, is not an option and would cast doubt on the appropriateness of the second option.

Lunsford would love that.

The good Christians at Bible Baptist Academy in DeQuincy could stand a refresher course on their Bible verses and the teachings of Christianity.

For example, there’s this verse from John, Chapter 6, Verse 37: “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out.”

That’s Jesus Christ speaking, in case you didn’t immediately recognize the verse and lots of folks who call themselves God’s people rarely, if ever, crack that book called the Holy Bible. Rather, they just sit in a pew on Sunday morning and nod their heads to the preacher’s words like they actually had a clue what he was talking about. They’ll throw out an occasional “Amen” because it looks and sounds good to those around them.

But somehow, they’re missing the central message of Christianity, which is to love one another and help those less fortunate. I know folks who will get their undies in a wad just because someone else got to church earlier and staked out their regular pew before them.

Or how about this one from Luke, Chapter 6, Verse 42: “How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye.”

What’s put the burr under my saddle to make me go off on a tangent like this?

The Bible Baptist Academy in DeQuincy, that paragon of virtue, that monument to all that is holy, has given the boot to a five-year-old kindergartner who lost her father in a workplace accident … because she is now living with her new adoptive parents, a gay couple.

Perhaps the administrators at Bible Baptist Academy in DeQuincy could brush up on this verse from Romans, Chapter 15, Verse 7: “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring glory to God.”

Hmm. That one seems to hit home.

Here’s one that knocks it out of the park, from First Corinthians (not One Corinthians, Trump), Chapter 13, Verse 13: “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.”

Emily Parker and wife Jennie recently adopted Zoey, Jennie’s niece, after Zoey first lost her mother and then her father last September. It was not immediately clear how she lost her mother but Jennie said now Zoey’s losing her school.

The Parkers were called to the principal’s office only two days before the school year started and they were told that because of their lifestyle choices and because Bible Baptist Academy in DeQuincy is a religious-based school and because students are taught that marriage was between a man and a woman and — well, just because — Zoey’s no longer welcome.

Meanwhile, there’s this breaking news story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/12/fbi-southern-baptist-sexual-abuse/?wpisrc=nl_headlines&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F37a3e7f%2F62f77646cfe8a216012b1f39%2F5cd6d39eade4e21ae0fd327e%2F42%2F59%2F62f77646cfe8a216012b1f39&wp_cu=5f9eae47041a5f47f1cb6742b761281d%7C889DF7FF94C45EFEE0530100007FB9CA

Here’s another, for good measure, from Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 1: “Judge not that ye be not judged.”

Bible Baptist Academy in DeQuincy may not be the WESTBORO BAPTIST CHURCH just yet, but they’ve certainly laid the groundwork.

Earlier Thursday, I sent this photo around to some of my friends (I do still have a few out there) with the caption: All You Need to Know About the GOP.

Turns out I would be proven so very wrong before the sun went down.

And wouldn’t you know it took a couple of Louisiana natives like Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (FRC), and House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise to do it – with a little help from the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.

Before I get too far into this subject, let me offer a disclaimer. I’m certainly no fan of the FBI after what it pulled on LSU professor Steven Hatfield in its BOTCHED INVESTIGATION of those anthrax letters 20 years ago or how it destroyed the career – and life – of Richard Jewell in wrongly naming him a suspect in the Atlanta CENTENNIAL OLYMPIC PARK bombing in 1996.

It’s kind of hard to overlook screwups of such tragic magnitude.

But the raid on Mar-a-Lago was not carried out on the FBI’s initiative. It was not the work of a “rouge” agency, as the US Representative from Louisiana’s 1^st Congressional District would have us believe.

Nor was the raid necessarily a reflection of the FBI’s political politization as claimed by Baton Rouge native and head of what has recently been officially designated as a church Tony “Tattoo” Perkins. (A former Marine, he dislikes having attention called to the tattoo he got during his military days – which is why I bring it up because…well, I’m just that way.)

So, while I’m on the subject of FRC President Tattoo Perkins, let’s just go ahead and get his observations on the raid out of the way because his tirade was briefer than that of Scalise.

Perkins, you will remember is the one who said natural disasters like Katrina were God’s punishment for our debauchery and was His way of trying to get our attention. (That was, of course, before Perkins’s own home was submerged in the flood of 2016.)

About the Raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, Perkins tweeted his opposition. “Who trusts the FBI to pursue justice?” he asked. “The agency has become so politicized that even if their actions were justified half the nation still would not trust them.”

Okay, that’s a fair question, given my own suspicions after the Hatfield and Jewell debacles.

But wait. Remember the IRS has officially recognized the FRC as a church, which was already a tax-exempt entity. The church recognition throws up additional shields against having to reveal who its financial supporters are. BUT, with that recognition goes a prohibition against getting involved in partisan politics at the risk of losing that tax-exempt status.

It somehow seems to me that Perkins is treading dangerously close to the edge of that prohibition with inflammatory remarks like that.

I’m all about freedom of expression but when you hide behind the tax-exempt status by calling yourself a church, you necessarily forfeit some of those rights just as do certain other non-profits.

Rev. FRANKLIN GRAHAM said pretty much the same thing, lamenting, “Thirty years ago the FBI lost a lot of credibility over the unfortunate events that surrounded Ruby Ridge. Last night as we watched the events that unfolded at Mar-a-Lago, I couldn’t help but think that the FBI and DOJ are losing credibility and the trust of the American people again.”

Also a fair observation. But then Graham went a bit further. “I have no idea what was in former President Trump’s safe, but if the government thought there was something there that belonged to them, they certainly could have asked for it.”

Um…fact is, Rev., they did. The issued subpoenas months ago and Trump simply ignored them.

And of course, that OTHER GRAHAM, Sen. Lindsey, demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland ‘splain himself and justify the raid.

Um…fact is, Lap Dog Lindsey, Garland did in fact say in no uncertain terms on Thursday that he personally signed off on the raid and asked that the court UNSEAL THE SEARCH WARRANT and property receipt and make them public. He gave Trump until 3 p.m. Friday to FILE AN OBJECTION to unsealing the warrant.

Now let’s turn our attention to Thursday’s rant by House Minority Whip STEVE SCALISE on Fox & Friends. You’d never know the man was up for reelection after hearing his half-crazed put-down of the FBI. Then again, given the lily-white uber-conservative district he represents in Jefferson Parish, maybe you would.

No matter. His histrionics Thursday just did not seem to coalesce with the law-and-order message of the former Repugnantcan Party. Rather, he seemed to serve as an echo chamber for the mob that attacked and beat Capitol police on that fateful day in early January 2021 and for those who are now screaming for defunding and dismantling the FBI and issuing death threats against its agents.

“…[I]t concerns everybody if you see some agents go rogue and if you see an agency that doesn’t have the right checks and balances at the top. This is coming from the top.”

“Who went rogue?” asked Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy. “They were following a search warrant.”

“We want to find that out,” Scalise replied.

The Washington Post pounced on the obvious contradiction so evident in the mindset of Repugnantcans like Scalise – evident to everyone but Repugnantcans like Scalise, that is.

“When members of the Supreme Court faced threats after the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade,” the paper pointed out, “Scalise was among Republicans who criticized that response. In fact, he did so on ‘Fox & Friends’, calling for House Democrats to bring to a vote legislation protecting justices. (They did so; it became law.)

“’Any kind of federal judges are not, by law, allowed to be threatened that way,’ Scalise said then, ‘and yet the Justice Department won’t take action. They need to. This is a real concern.’

“The difference is obvious: Who’s making the threats. Threats against Supreme Court justices and protests at their houses (violating a legal statute and spurring Scalise’s excoriation of the Justice Department) came from advocates of abortion access, largely on the left, The Post said.

“Threats against the FBI and those involved in the Mar-a-Lago search are coming from the right. From Scalise’s base. And just as Republicans spent weeks playing along with Trump’s false claims about the election after November 2020, Republicans are now playing along with his insistence that the search is necessarily partisan and illegitimate.”

In poker vernacular, by asking the court to unseal the warrant, Garland has called the bet. Is Trump bluffing? It’s put-up or shut-up time for the former guy. Who will blink first?