This is an opinion column.
Forget all those “don’t say gay” laws. In Alabama, it’s taboo to even be named Gay.
As my colleague Williesha Morris reported Sunday, a kids’ picture book about the construction of a doghouse was deemed potentially sexually explicit and thus listed among books to be moved from the children’s section of the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library (HMCPL) system.
Not because of its content, but because the author’s name is Gay. Marie-Louise Gay.
Or, as they say in Alabama, Marie-Louise (Bleep).
I’d blame artificial intelligence, but there’s nothing artificial or intelligent about any of this. It’s just real stupid.
Like this whole manufactured library “porn” scare. Mom’s for Liberty and assorted purgers look for books that acknowledge the existence of gay or trans people or talk about racial inequality, and then they shout “porn.”
More like:
“POOOOOOOOORN!”
It’s indecent to be different in Alabama. Or to think differently.
So Gov. Kay Ivey threatens funding for libraries with “sexually explicit” children’s books, as if Larry Flynt is in the kid lit biz.
And book banners use search terms like “gay” to rid library books without bothering to read them.
I guess students will study the Enola (Bleep) and the (Bleep)-continental railroad. They’ll miss out on the (Bleep) Nineties, and they’ll never hear of UA’s own (Bleep) Talese.
Out of dumb, bigoted, fear mongering ignorance.
Let me say it out loud. Nobody wants obscenity in the children’s section. And it’s not there.
As Alabama Library Association President Matthew Layne aptly put it:
“To my knowledge, no sexually explicit material has ever been on display in any Alabama library’s children’s department which begs the question, how is the governor’s office defining ‘sexually explicit?’ Common sense and common decency dictate that any material containing sexually explicit images or passages would not be located in a children’s department of a library. If there were indeed such items, then I would expect the library and the community it serves to act accordingly to have them removed.”
It’s not about decency. It’s about equating difference to indecency.
I’m reminded, weirdly enough, of a letter John Adams wrote to his old frenemy Thomas Jefferson in May of 1816. In that letter Adams bad-mouthed the Jesuits and their Restoration a couple years before.
“I do not like the Resurrection of the Jesuits,” Adams wrote, arguing that they stood in the way of intellectual growth, and obstructed “the improvement of the human mind in society.”
Let me make it clear here. I am not here to impugn the Jesuits (though they probably deserve it). Just Moms for Liberty, Clean Up Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey and their ilk.
When Jefferson got around to replying to Adams, on August 1, 1816, he acknowledged up front that he didn’t know much about the history of the Jesuits.
But he went on to talk about his own beliefs, and the importance of a free pursuit of ideas as a way to move from darkness to light.
Because suppression of ideas is simply intolerance. Bigotry.
“Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid mind; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant,” he wrote. “Education and free discussion are the antidote of both.”
Education and free discussion are the antidote for a whole lot of things.
Jefferson didn’t claim to know it all, or to be right about it all, but he knew where he, and Adams, stood.
“We shall have our follies without doubt. Some one or more of them will always be afloat,” Jefferson wrote. “But ours will be the follies of enthusiasm, not of bigotry.”
I will claim that folly, too. With enthusiasm. And this next part, too.
“We are destined,” Jefferson wrote, “to be a barrier against the returns of ignorance and barbarism.”
Be that.
