What A Blue State Can Do.

You all have seen all the negative stuff coming out of Republican states but what about Blue states?

The state Illinois has a trifecta… The Democrats control the governorship, the House and the Senate and they passed what is the first in the nation… a ban on book bannings!

Illinois becomes the first state in the U.S. to ban book bans

Citing a “vitriolic strain of white nationalism,” Gov. JB Pritzker signed the measure withholding state grant money from libraries if they ban books.

WBEZ

By Alex Degman

June 12, 2023

With the strokes of multiple pens, Gov. JB Pritzker made Illinois the first state in the nation to withhold funding from public libraries if they ban books.

“Book bans are about censorship, marginalizing people, marginalizing ideas and facts,” Pritzker declared at the Harold Washington Library, the crown jewel of Chicago’s public library system. “Regimes ban books, not democracies.”

“All Illinoisans deserve to see themselves reflected in the books that they read, the art that they see, the history they learn,” he said.

Under the law, libraries have to adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, which says, among other things, that “materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.” If the public or school library chooses not to follow these guidelines or similar ones, they’ll lose access to grant funding.

WOW!

Alexi Giannoulias, the newly elected Democratic Secretary of State, campaigned on the issue and called librarians heroes.“Many librarians have been forced to quit after being harassed and subjected to intimidation and hateful messages on social media, others have been fired for refusing to remove books from circulation,” he said. “The concept of banning books contradicts the very essence of what our country stands for. It also defies what education is all about: teaching our children to think for themselves. When books are banned, we’re at risk from the harm that ignorance brings.”

Thanks to a reader who brought this article to my attention via Stana.

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At the next meeting of the legislative LGBTQ+ Health and Human Services Network meeting we am getting briefed later this month on the LGBTQ+ legislation this session on the good, the bad, and the ugly bills that were introduced and what passed.

And this article has given my an idea to suggest a similar introduced here in Connecticut next session.

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Florida want to ban… now get this… The Diary of Anne Frank!

Yup, you read that right!

'Anne Frank pornography' being banned in Florida, Texas schools

Jerusalem Post

By Andrew Lapin  

June13, 2023

Among the many books that conservative parents have recently asked their children’s schools to remove is a lushly illustrated version of the most famous Holocaust diary.

The graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, published in English in 2018, has found itself at the center of a growing number of controversies involving book removals from school libraries. A small number of passionate activists have pushed for the book to be removed from schools in Florida and Texas, calling it “pornography” and even “antisemitic.” Sometimes, they’ve succeeded.

[…]

Proponents of removing the book from schools say the graphic adaptation is essentially an obscene version that distorts Frank’s legacy and aids in “grooming” children. Even some Jewish parents and at least one Jewish lawmaker have objected to the book’s presence in schools.

So what got them in a dither?

Critics of the book say they are objecting to the small handful of passages in which Anne describes sexual matters. In one, she discusses a time she asked a female friend if they could show each other their breasts, but was rebuffed. (“If only I had a girlfriend,” she muses.) In another, she describes clinical details of her own vagina.

That what set them off… nothing sexual. Nothing pornographic. Just describing her own body, just like most teenagers thinks are their body goes though puberty.

But that is too much for the goody-two-shoes.