Sarah Palin’s book-banning quest hits the wires
Earlier this morning I saw CNN’s Carol Costello adamantly insist while interviewing ex-NYC mayor Ed Koch that her network had proved that the book banning rumors about Palin were demonstrably false. According to the Associated Press (and yours truly), Carol Costello is an idiot:
The McCain campaign is defending Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s much-criticized inquiry into banning books at her hometown library, saying her questions were only hypothetical.
Shortly after taking office in 1996 as mayor of Wasilla, a city of about 7,000 people, Palin asked the city’s head librarian about banning books. Later, the librarian was notified by Palin that she was being fired, although Palin backed off under pressure. [...]
Taylor Griffin, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said Thursday that Palin asked the head librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, on three occasions how she would react to attempts at banning books. He said the questions, in the fall of 1996, were hypothetical and entirely appropriate. He said a patron had asked the library to remove a title the year before and the mayor wanted to understand how such disputes were handled.
Palin, apparently, didn’t want to “understand” how Emmons could have provided her with the answer she wasn’t looking for…
Palin notified Emmons she would be fired in January 1997 because the mayor didn’t feel she had the librarian’s “full support.” Emmons was reinstated the next day after public outcry, according to newspaper reports at the time.
Still, one longtime library staffer recalls that the run-in made everyone fear for their jobs.
“Mayor Palin gave us some terrible moments and some rather gut-wrenching moments, particularly when Mary Ellen said she was going to have to leave,” said Cathy Petrie, who managed the children’s collection at the time. [...]
According to the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman newspaper, Emmons did not mince words when Palin asked her “how I would deal with her saying a book can’t be in the library” on Oct. 28, 1996, in a week when the mayor had asked department heads for letters of resignation.
“She asked me if I would object to censorship, and I replied ‘Yup’,” Emmons told a reporter. “And I told her it would not be just me. This was a constitutional question, and the American Civil Liberties Union would get involved, too.”
The Rev. Howard Bess, a liberal Christian preacher in the nearby town of Palmer, said the church Palin and her family attended until 2002, the Wasilla Assembly of God, was pushing to remove his book from local bookstores.
Emmons told him that year that several copies of “Pastor I Am Gay” had disappeared from the library shelves, Bess said.
“Sarah brought pressure on the library about things she didn’t like,” Bess said. “To believe that my book was not targeted in this is a joke.”
Kind of makes you wish Charlie Gibson asked her to clarify what kind of reform she was hoping to bring to America, doesn’t it?
RELATED: ABC News’ report on this story.
FUNNY: “Alaska’s Most Popular Bumpersticker”
Posted by Kevin K. on 09/12/08 at 02:09 PM • Permalink
Categories: News • Politics • Election '08 • St. McSame • Nutters • Sarah Palin • Our Stupid Media • Relijun •
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