Louisiana Voice

Libraries, it seems, pose an imminent threat to our very way of life. They are destroying the minds and souls of our children, usurping parental authority, laying the groundwork for a (communist, Islamic, or Hispanic – pick one) takeover of our country.

Book banning is the only solution!

The hysteria is spreading throughout the local levels of government in America and you need to voice your opposition at today’s meeting of the Livingston Parish Council at 6 p.m. in the Parish Governmental Building in Livingston.

You never heard such rot in your life – at least not since the Joe McCarthy-spawned panic of the 1950s that produced those silly Americanism vs. Communism classes in high school and the asinine elementary school drills on how to duck under your desk in case of a nuclear attack.

Or the widespread phobia that when desegregation came to our lily-white schools, it would mean the end of life as we knew it. Why, who knows? They might even start dating our daughters (forgetting for the moment that it usually takes the consent of both to constitute a date). Of course, when we had a black running back who could power over the opposition or a point guard who could shoot the eyes out of the basket, we embraced him as “ours” – until his eligibility was up and then we conveniently forgot all about him, tossing him aside like yesterday’s newspaper.

My grandfather taught me that was the very definition of hypocrisy, as was the profession of Christianity on Sunday while donning a white sheet on Saturday night to burn a cross on someone’s lawn.

I remember when I first moved to Denham Springs back in 1981, we visited the Livingston Parish Fair. When a family parked next to us and exited their vehicle, I overhead the wife asking the husband, “Aren’t you going to lock the car? There’s a book on the back seat.”

The husband replied, “When we get back, the car may be gone but the book will still be there.”

We laughed, but his joke was closer to the truth than we would’ve liked. The parish library at the time was housed in a single, cramped room in the back of a medical complex and boasted an embarrassingly limited number of books.

We (Livingston Parish) were a standing joke at the local comedy club with the touring comics and I admit, as club emcee, I am guilty of my own pointed jabs at the prevailing redneck culture of the time. Such was the reputation of Livingston Parish 40 years ago.

I’d love to think that we’ve progressed beyond that. A population explosion caused by the availability of cheap land in more peaceful surroundings coupled with I-12 access to a Baton Rouge commute saw subdivisions spring up like mushrooms in a cow patty. New schools were built, we got a new courthouse and best of all, we built a parish-wide library system of which we can be justifiably proud.

Until now.

Now, the lunatics are trying to run the asylum as the movement to censor – and ban – books picks up momentum. It’s a favorite tactic of any totalitarian dictator: clamp down on literature that might be deemed offensive or perceived as threatening.

They just did it in Jamestown, Michigan, where the public library was defunded over the librarian’s refusal to censor or ban a LGBTQ book. They claimed the library was “grooming” children and calling library staff pedophiles.

Sound familiar? That’s what a guy named Michael Lunsford, head of a fringe outfit called Citizens for a New Louisiana, is attempting to do across the state. He’s already initiated similar efforts in Lafayette and Caddo parishes and now he’s weaseled his way into Livingston by launching a frontal – and defamatory – attack on a popular school librarian.

And now the Livingston Parish Council, in an obviously underhanded effort to conceal its actions from the public, has “added” a late “addendum” to its agenda for today’s meeting:

• Discussion and possible resolution of support for the reclassification of certain books in the Livingston Parish Public Library.

(Nothing like a late add-on to an agenda item to sneak through controversial actions.)

In a parish devastated by widespread flooding in 2016, it would seem the parish council would have more important matters to consider – like instituting flood control and dredging of the Amite River – than worrying about exposing innocent children to the dreadful poison of LGBTQ books. There’s an old Bob Dylan song that seems relevant today:

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land

and don’t criticize what you don’t understand.

Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly aging.

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand

for the times, they are a-changin’.

“Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.” A most relevant line, one worth remembering.

Grooming? These narrow-minded bureaucrats are so locked in to what some book might contain, they’ve completely overlooked a thing called the Internet and cell phones.

Kids today all have cellphones and those cellphones all have Internet access and cameras. They can access all the LGBTQ literature and all the porn they can imagine – without your knowledge or your consent. And don’t think for a nano-second that some aren’t taking – and sending – explicit selfies to each other. It’s called sexting. And even more dangerous than any book, some are communicating with creepy adults who can introduce them to a much more dangerous world of drugs and sex trafficking.

And we’re worried about some book? C’mon, aren’t there any adults in the room? A book isn’t going to make a kid gay and no religious indoctrination is going to change a gay child to straight.

Book banning is wrong on every level imaginable. We’ve already seen math textbooks banned in Florida, for what possible reason I haven’t the foggiest. This may sound alarmist and it may appear to be some sort of scare tactic but remember where you read this:

If this effort succeeds, it will be just the first step to shutting down American history lessons that don’t agree with someone’s political agenda. It will be the first step toward censoring any literature about women’s rights (like the struggle for women’s suffrage, for example). It will be the first step toward abolishing any teaching about the American Civil War or about the struggle for civil rights. It could even be the first step toward reverting to not allowing blacks or women or even non-property owners to vote.

Drastic? Yes. Draconian? You bet. But once that first step is allowed, the second and third and subsequent steps will be much easier. Once it is decided what you may or may not read, it will be an easy matter to strip away the rest of your rights.

Please be in attendance at 6 p.m. at the Livingston Parish Governmental Building in Livingston to show your opposition to this new form of kneejerk McCarthyism and your crucial support for Livingston Parish librarians. It’s important.

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Considerable negative coverage has been given the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) in recent weeks following the deaths of at least three toddlers in the Baton Rouge and Houma areas and the sexual abuse of boys living in a dilapidated foster home in Baton Rouge.

But the problems besetting DCFS go back several years and can be laid at the feet of former Gov. Bobby Jindal, who, in typical Republican fashion, chose to abandon the most vulnerable of Louisiana’s citizens by slashing funding for the agency, producing a turnover rate of nearly 25 percent in 2014 that in turn resulted in a 33 percent reduction in the number of DCFS employees.

Jindal’s gutting of the agency made it virtually impossible for case workers to perform their jobs properly, according to a 77-page report: A Review of Child Welfare, the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services.

At one point, a caseworker in Ouachita Parish was arrested and booked into East Baton Rouge Parish Prison after being accused of filing false reports about mandatory monthly in-home visits with children in foster care.

That was in February 2016. A month earlier, LouisianaVoice received a confidential email from a retired DCFS supervisor who revealed a disturbing trend in her former agency.

“I served in most programs within the agency, foster care, investigations, and adoptions,” she wrote. “Over my career I witnessed the eight years of Jindal’s ‘improvements.’

“Those ‘improvements’ endanger children’s lives daily. The blight is spread from the Secretary to the lowliest clerical worker in the agency. People are overworked and underpaid but it’s not just that. People are so distraught from the unrelenting stress that children are in danger. Add to that the inexperience of most front-line workers and their supervisors’ inability to properly train new staff.”

She then dropped a bombshell that should serve as a wake-up call to everyone who cares or pretends to care about the welfare of children—from Gov. John Bel Edwards down to the most obscure freshman legislator:

“In the Shreveport Region, the regional administrator (recently) told workers that they may make ‘drive-by’ visits to foster homes, which means talking to the foster parents in their driveway. Policy says that workers will see both the child and the foster parent in the home, interviewing each separately (emphasis added). A lot of abuse goes on in foster homes. Some foster families are truly doing the best they can but they need counseling and guidance from their workers. The regional administrator’s answer to that one? Have the foster parent call their home development worker—another person who can’t get her job done now.”

She wrote that she heard of two separate incidents “where a child new to foster care was taken to a foster home and left without paperwork, without contact information for the person in charge of the case, and without knowing even the child’s name.”

You may read the entire 2016 LouisianaVoice post by going HERE.

Adoptions is another area in which there are serious questions about DCFS. A Baton Rouge couple, Christy and Craig Mills, know first-hand the frustrations of trying to get the agency to take action on their behalf in an adoption attempt that went all wrong.

In October 2013, they successfully adopted a baby girl, Morgan, after she was born to a homeless couple, Thomas and Carol, with whom the Mills were working. In February 2014, Thomas and Carol contacted the Mills to inform them they were expecting again and wished to adopt that baby out as well.

The Mills, wishing to keep the natural siblings together, quickly agreed.

Working through the DeColores Adoptions International in Lake Charles and its representative, adoption attorney/social worker Lisa Perquet Harell, the Mills began providing shelter, food, transportation to and from medical visits, and a cell phone for Thomas and Carol.

Four days before the baby boy was born, with Harell’s assistance, Thomas and Carol were suddenly relocated to an undisclosed hotel in New Orleans. It turned out, unbeknownst to the Mills, the expectant couple was also receiving financial assistance from a Denham Springs couple who eventually adopted the infant.

The Mills filed a formal complaint against Harell for an alleged conflict of interest. Included in the package containing the complaint was a copy of a 2005 consent agreement and order in which Lisa Perquet, then a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) admitted to falsifying documents attesting that she had conducted home visits of adoptees on three occasions and that she failed to maintain fee charges and other billing information for the required six years.

The now eight-year-old complaint pointed out that DCFS’s own child placing agency standards say that “Placement of siblings as a family group is usually the preferred placement.”

“Adoption fraud dominates conversations in the adoption industry and has negative effects on families across the country,” the complaint by the Mills says. “We know first-hand how an alleged wrongful adoption has impacted our own lives today and will impact these two children’s lives once they are old enough to learn that a group of adults and adoption professionals licensed by the State of Louisiana, in our opinion intentionally kept them from being together for the purposes of their own monetary gain.”

That complaint and accompanying documents can be seen in their entirety at the beginning of this post.

You need a program to keep up with all the lame excuses the former guy has tossed out to justify his possessing more than a dozen boxes of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home/golf club/resort.

First it was “homework,” that he was just taking the documents with him to continue working on them. Well, first, he has never been one to do “homework” in his entire life and second, when you are no longer president, you no longer are responsible for handling affairs of state.

Then, he proclaimed that Obama took 30 million classified docs with him when he left office. Not so. The documents were taken by the National Archives and Records Administration to a NARA facility in the Chicago area where they remain in exclusive possession of NARA.

As a third “alternate fact,” he claims he gave the order to “declassify” all such documents on his way out the door in January 2021. Again, not so, according to those who FORMERLY WORKED FOR HIM. There’s a process that must be followed and that process is very detailed and meticulous.

Finally, he claims that everything was packed in a hurry and he didn’t have time to go over everything that was thrown into cardboard boxes.

That is probably closer to the truth. After all, he had already determined he wasn’t going quietly or willingly, so why pack to leave?

But now, we have the most novel explanation of all and it’s only because it’s so ludicrous, so off the rails, so bizarre, that I give it any exposure here at all. After all, if you can get past the fact that some disturbed individual is actually passing it off as truth (and that some pitifully disillusioned souls are buying it), then it’s kind of funny. Sort of.

It’s the explanation given by the mysterious “Q” of QAnon infamy and (spoiler alert) it’s a doozy.

You see, thanks to Q, we now can rest assured in the knowledge that the FBI “raid” of Mar-a-Lago (and it wasn’t a raid; no guns were drawn, no doors busted down and the Secret Service was alerted beforehand – it was more of a “normal tourist visit”) was a ploy hatched by none other than…(wait for it)…Donald Trump.

Yep, that’s what [s]he says. But don’t take my word for it, here is the actual transcript, as posted by a retired history teacher from Denham Springs, who apparently buys what Q is selling:

Q: Trust Wray. Who leads the FBI?

(He’s talking about Christopher Wray, Trump’s appointee to head up the FBI.)

Q: How do you get evidence entered legally?

Answer, according to Q: A raid by the FBI gets it (evidence) on the record.

Q: Who has all the information?

Answer: DJT, the former guy.

So, there you have it. Trump conspired with Wray to “arrange” for Attorney General Merrick Garland to seek approval of a search warrant, which a judge signed, so that the FBI could take into its possession all that damning information that Trump has been holding for more than 18 months now that will absolve him of everything bad and cast a pall over Joe Biden’s administration.

And now that the FBI and the Justice Department have it, it’s officially “on the record” and will now become public knowledge.

God, the man’s a genius. We played right into his hands.

This is the same Q, by the way, who assured us that Trump would be restored to his rightful position of president on July 23 of this year. I think he has since pushed the date back to sometime in October.

Can’t wait to see what happens.

But of course, Q knew this all along.

On a related note, it seems I’m being recruited for consideration for possible membership in an outfit called the Cajun Guard (not to be confused with the Cajun Navy).

I did a STORY about the Cajun Guard, a local militia-type organization more than two years ago, in June 2020. In writing that story, I reached out to the organization to request more information about them in an effort to give them a chance to present their objectives.

The web site of one of the individuals I profiled in that story has since been taken down.

I finally got a response last Tuesday (Aug. 16), more than two years later, from a guy who identified himself only as “Kevin.” Kevin said he was “responsible for recruitment, among other things.”.

But rather than provide me with any information about the organization, I was invited for “lunch or coffee” to discuss the organization’s “vetting…select individuals/families to join our family,” adding that the Cajun Guard wishes “to expand the members and efforts to the entire state.”

Thanks, Kevin, but I think I’ll pass.

Twenty stabbing in the span of a single month.

Prisoners sharing a syringe issued for a diabetic prisoner.

Regular prisoner-on-prisoner beatings – and guards who refuse to intervene.

Beaten and stabbed prisoners who are allowed to go untreated or, at best, treated superficially.

These are just some of the problems plaguing the Catahoula Parish Prison in Harrisonburg, according to the family member of a prisoner.

One prisoner suffered a broken arm when beaten by other inmates and subsequently received no treatment for his broken arm. He was allowed to shower only twice in the next 28 days.

The 900-prisoner facility is operated by the Catahoula Parish Sheriff’s Office after severing its ties with the previous management firm, LaSalle Corrections, in May of 2021.

“No intake is conducted on prisoners when they come into the prison,” the source, who asked not to be identified because of a family member who is incarcerated there, said. “At the end of 2021, they put a prisoner in a headlock and sexually assaulted him with a knife.

“Guards tased a prisoner and threw him back in with other inmates who had just beaten him.”

One prisoner was attacked and stabbed in the neck. Prison officials treated the stab wound with super glue and put him back on the floor with the prisoners who had just attacked him, the source said. “They made no effort to confiscate the weapon.”

The source said shivs are made from paneling in the prison shower.

“Another prisoner was tased by guards who then threw him back with the inmates who had just beaten him.

“I’m concerned that someone is going to die there. There were 20 stabbings in the span of a single month and a syringe belonging to a diabetic is shared by inmates who have access to drugs. Something has to be done.”

Catahoula Parish Sheriff Tony Edwards did not return a call from LouisianaVoice.

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.