Well, that was a reaction
- By : Nat
- Category : Administrative
Yesterday’s post about socialism accusations being aimed at Peanuts and drawing a parallel to today’s attacks on libraries actually didn’t get much response. Even when I shared a version on social media, I got a mere handful of “likes”. But the one email I got was a doozy.
I mean, it’s not often your humble AAUGH Blogger gets accused of “Nazi propaganda”.
Now, setting aside the fact that while the Nazis were known for many things, defense of libraries was not among them, the logic of the letter was lacking. The basic point was that I’d depicted the attacks on libraries as nefarious, when “The problem is the books with sexually explicit content and pornagraphy being in the CHILDREN’s section of public libraries and in public school libraries altogether[…]And these books need to be relocated in public libraries – removed entirely from the Children’s section of the library. And placed in a remote area out of public view” But is that what’s really going on? Let’s take a look at, say, the situation in that arose over the Patmos Library in Jamestown Charter Township in Michigan. The sadly successful drive to defund the library arose primarily over the graphic novel Gender Queer, an award-winning memoir. As the article notes, the book had been moved from the adult section to behind the counter… and that did not stop the drive to shut down the library. There was also in this calls to ban two graphic novels that depicted girls who wanted to kiss girls. So it’s pretty clear that what was being sought is erasure of books about people who are different in certain ways. And as a person who cares about people in general (and has specific people he particularly cares about on all but one letter of the LGBTQIA chain), this does not accord well with me.
This person threatened to talk about my horribleness on social media and on a podcast, so if anyone here has come due to that publicity, welcome! You’ll find decades worth of back catalog here on that ever so controversial topic of Peanuts books. (It’s a nerdy little site.)
The letter writer did try to steer things toward Peanuts and Charles Schulz, including pointing out that Schulz was a “conservative Christian”… but that is a misleading descriptor. Schulz was conservative and Christian… but his Christianity, flowing from the big-tent attitude of The Church of God to more of a congregationless form, was not conservative. (He also did not seem to be a “Christian conservative”, focusing on making the law directly reflective and subservient to some take on the Bible. He self-described as an “Eisenhower Republican”, which describes a moderate and practical view.) Would Schulz have been against graphic novels about girls who want to kiss girls? Well, I cannot speak to what was in Schulz’s heart, but I can tell you that he hired onto his staff a cartoonist whose primary work at the time was a series about a woman who not only wanted to but actually did kiss women.
In any case, support your local library, and don’t believe everything anti-library crusaders may tell you… particularly if it’s about me.
