SafeLibraries Says the ALA is Strongarming Nicholasville, Kentucky!

Since SafeLibraries has censored me on his own blog, I’ll have to take the unusual step of responding to his disinformation on my own.  On Monday, November 9th, he posted an article about the firing of two desk attendants at the Jessamine County public library in Nicholasville, KY.  “ALA Controls Nicholasville,” his headline shouts.  Let's take a look at how he’s twisted facts into delusion yet again.

He claims that the employees were fired “overnight,” even though the Lexington Herald-Leader article he himself cites states clearly that they had been interfering with library policy for a year. 

He claims that citizens who came to a library meeting to discuss the firing and the appropriateness of library materials were unfairly silenced because they weren’t on the agenda.  He refuses to accept the plain fact that “not on the agenda” means no more and no less than “not on the agenda.”

He writes “the library actually refuses to comply with the citizens.”  How so?  He offers no details nor a shred of evidence that this is so.  What did the citizens actually ask for?  How many asked for it?  Was a vote taken?  Was it a majority opinion?  By what legal process was some will of the people established?  He’s just casting groundless aspersions.

In his view, the problem here is the American Library Association, which is somehow overriding community wishes.  He offers not the slightest bit of evidence that this took place.  The ALA is no more than a professional and advisory organization.  It has no regulatory or compulsory authority over anybody or anything.  Firing these employees was entirely the decision of the local library and library board, not of the ALA.  

SafeLibraries is obsessed with the ALA, which he claims is imposing some kind of arbitrary ideology on libraries everywhere.  He refuses to accept the fact the ALA policies are firmly grounded in Free Speech law.  When I asked pointed questions about those laws, he claimed I was engaging in a personal attack and deleted my comments.

He writes, “In that battle, guess who wins? The ALA. The children lose.”   As if the ALA was even involved in the battle! And how did the children lose? The unspoken, and unsubstantiated, claim is that children “lose” by having access to risqué graphic novels like Black Dossier.  Of course, he counts as nothing the First Amendment rights of minors to receive information.  Do children really win if, in our haste to protect them from age-inappropriate materials, we eliminate their Free Speech rights?  He enters into evidence not a single legal principle that would allow the library to restrict any minor's access to that book. 

He refers to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s book The Bluest Eye as “the bestiality book.”  I reviewed that book on this blog, and found that it contained the WORD bestiality, but not the slightest description of any such act.  And when I called attention to his factual inaccuracy, he claimed I was trying to “besmirch” and “belittle” him, and deleted my comment as a personal attack.

He claims that “a community gets to decide for itself what is appropriate in its own public library.”  In fact, no such legal principle exists.  While the definition of obscenity is allowed to vary somewhat according to “community standards,” the Supreme Court has been quite clear that juries cannot push those standards to an infinite degree, and that materials like the Black Dossier book cannot be classified as obscene with regard to adults (see Jenkins v. Georgia).   SafeLibraries fails to comprehend that Free Speech rights are defined by the US Constitution and are NOT subject to arbitrary redefinition by states or localities.

His abuse of legal precedents reaches its peak in his handling of the Supreme Court’s US v. ALA decision, which upheld the federal government’s right to require internet filters on computers used by children as a condition attached to the acceptance of certain government funds.  SafeLibraries insists, relentlessly, that this case is some kind of major break with earlier Free Speech precedents, and no amount of quoting or explaining will snap him out of that utter delusion.  The US v. ALA decision says absolutely nothing of relevance to the Jessamine County library situation. 

I could go on and on, but I need to stop.

What SafeLibraries Doesn't Want You To Read.

Responding to posts on SafeLibraries' blog is often a dicey matter for me, since I find it very difficult to understand what he thinks does or does not constitute a personal attack.  He often accuses me of attacking him personally, when it appears to me I am only addressing the issues he's brought up.  Case in point is his post of Monday, November 9th, and my responses.  I only have some of that traffic, since he deleted my comments. You be the judge:

Non-Censor said...

Who is being unfair to whom? It is not fair of you to accuse me of personal attacks when all I have done is respond to the claims you yourself have made.

You DID say the firings took place overnight, and when I said you were incorrect about that I was not stating my personal opinion, but was referring to information provided in the Lexington Herald-Leader. I said so, and I provided a link to the article. 

You are right that we disagree greatly about the ALA, but I have no reason or desire to paint them as angels. I just don't see why you heap blame on an advisory organization for legal matters they have no regulatory control over, or local library decisions they did not make.

I suppose you could say the ALA indirectly supported this by suggesting to member libraries that they allow any patron to check out any non-obscene book. But that is not just ALA ideology, but a reasonable interpretation of Free Speech law.

My comments about the "bestiality" book were not meant to belittle or besmirch you in any way. YOU brought it up, linking to that in your main post. I never would have mentioned it if you hadn't tried to use it as evidence to support your position.

And you did not answer my question. What legal principle or precedent do you think would allow the citizens of Jessamine County do do as you suggest, to override the legal structure already laid out by local government, to override professionally trained librarians, to alter library policy to conform to "community view," and even replace the board if they stand in the way? And when all of that is said and done, what shape do you think the new library policies, conforming to "community views," can be? What existing law allows Black Dossier to be handled by any library in Kentucky in a way that is different from what has already been don?

Tue Nov 10, 10:49:00 PM 2009

And his response was:

SafeLibraries said...

I am removing the comments of "Non-Censor" as he has resorted to personal attack, my blog posts are filled with his personal attacks, I recently got him to address the issues, but he has returned to personal attack.

Tue Nov 10, 11:17:00 PM 2009

Jessamine County Situation Gets Much Clearer

In my October 29th post here, and on a page on www.bannedinwestbend.info, I called attention to the firing of two library employees at the Jessamine County public library in Kentucky.  The two employees prevented an 11-year-old patron from checking out a graphic novel called Black Dossier, which is part of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series.  The library employees took this action because they felt the book was pornographic or obscene.

Finally, some more incisive reportage has clarified some of the uncertainties in this situation.  In an article that appeared on Sunday, November 8th, the Lexington Herald-Leader dug into the details.

As I suspected, the fired employees were circulation desk attendants and not full librarians (it was difficult to imagine librarians taking the actions these employees took).  Also as suspected, their termination did not result from this isolated incident, but from over a year of resistance to library policies.  At least one of the fired employees had challenged the book in question, going through the formal challenge process.  After her challenge was considered and rejected, the employee checked the book out to herself and kept checking it out.  Apparently, she still has the book, and is now accumulating 10 cents a day in late charges.  The employee continues to deny wanting to keep the book away from adults, although that is exactly what she is doing.

As is all too typical of many cases of censorship, rhetoric and reality are two quite different things.  The fired employees continue to assert that the book meets some legal definition of obscenity, even though the library considered that possibility and rejected it.  As the Herald-Leader points out, Kentucky state law on obscenity contains specific exemptions with regard to public libraries, which is common (although not universal) in states across the country.   Having examined the book myself, I can say with some certainty that it is racy but not obscene.  They have gone so far as to assert  that the library may be committing some kind of felony by having or circulating the book, and yet they never contacted the police about this alleged crime, a pattern we've seen carried out over and over again by people who say a book is obscene but know they'd be filing a false police report if they took their own words seriously enough to act upon them.

Also typical of many cases, the fired employees are asserting that the local community is a "conservative" one, and that "community standards" define the book in question as obscene.  This, of course, is based on the quite mistaken notion that local communities have infinite leeway in defining what or is not obscene.  As I've recently pointed out on this blog, the Supreme Court has been quite clear that community standards are flexible but nowhere near that flexible.

In my opinion, the Jessamine County public library is to be commended both for allowing these employees to work through the legitimate challenge procedures and for firing them when they made it perfectly clear that they were interfering with the library's basic mission.

Jenkins v. Georgia

In a 1973 case known as Miller v. California, the US Supreme Court established the legal test still in use today to determine whether or not books, movies, or other forms of expression are obscene. Miller requires that a work, taken as a whole, appeal to prurient interests, be patently offensive, and lack serious value.  An item must meet all three of these tests in order to be considered obscene in a legal sense.  Miller allows juries to apply "community standards" to determine what is prurient and  patently offensive.

The idea of "community standards" is important but problematic, and is often abused by would-be censors.  In many attempts at library censorship, the phrase "community standards" is recited like some kind of incantation aimed at allowing each locality an infinite degree of latitude with the definition of obscenity.  The censorious logic assumes that the community can declare anything it disapproves of to be patently offensive, and that such a declaration allows the material so labeled to be suppressed legally.  This logic is wrong at several levels, but especially in its abuse of the concept of "community standards."

The Jenkins v. Georgia decision, made in 1974, was an important clarification of this concept of "community standards."  The US Supreme Court held that juries can NOT, in fact, apply the term just because they disapprove of contested forms of expression.  On the contrary, the Court clarified that contested materials must rise to a certain level of explicitness before the label can be applied, and must be of a "hard core" nature.  The language of the decision makes it clear that mere nudity is not sufficient to meet the definition of "patently offensive," and that even sexual activity must be described in detail before it crossed that line.

The Jenkins case began in Georgia, where a man was convicted of violating that state's obscenity statute for showing the movie Carnal Knowledge in a theater.  The defendant appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, which upheld his conviction.  When the appeal was taken further, the US Supreme Court disagreed with the Georgia courts and overturned the conviction.  Part of the US Supreme Court's logic was that the movie was not obscene because it did not meet the definitions laid out in the Miller. The Georgia courts had erred in that they allowed the jury too much latitude in deciding what is and is not "patently offensive."

In the court's own words:

Even though questions of appeal to the "prurient interest" or of patent offensiveness are "essentially questions of fact," it would be a serious misreading of Miller to conclude that juries have unbridled discretion in determining what is "patently offensive." . . . . we made it plain that under that holding "no one will be subject to prosecution for the sale or exposure of obscene materials unless these materials depict or describe patently offensive 'hard core' sexual conduct . . . ."

Our own viewing of the film satisfies us that "Carnal Knowledge" could not be found under the Miller standards to depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way. Nothing in the movie falls within either of the two examples given in Miller of material which may constitutionally be found to meet the "patently offensive" element of those standards, nor is there anything sufficiently similar to such material to justify similar treatment. While the subject matter of the picture is, in a broader sense, sex, and there are scenes in which sexual conduct including "ultimate sexual acts" is to be understood to be taking place, the camera does not focus on the bodies of the actors at such times. There is no exhibition whatever of the actors' genitals, lewd or otherwise, during these scenes. There are occasional scenes of nudity, but nudity alone is not enough to make material legally obscene under the Miller standards.

For citations and descriptions of the Jenkins and Miller cases, Click Here.

Winters v. New York

Winters v. People of the State of New York (333 U.S. 507) is a US Supreme Court decision dating back to 1948, but still frequently cited today. The case overturned a state law prohibiting the publication or distribution of "true crime" magazines. The decision is one of many that are often cited as affirming the principle that restrictions on protected speech must be very narrowly drawn and written in highly specific language. One of the reasons the court overturned the state law was that the law was too vague and broad, failing to create a situation in which "an honest distributor of publications could know when he might be held to have ignored such a prohibition."

A passing remark in the court's decision has become a legal quotable quote, because it emphasizes that most expression is protected speech, even if the materials in dispute are something quite a bit less than great literature or art:

"Though we can see nothing of any possible value to society in these magazines, they are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best of literature."

This is an important point sometimes ignored by censorship proponents, who try to claim, incorrectly, that "junk" books and "trashy" novels aren't protected speech.