Vice
Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has taken a controversial
stand in favor of Freedom, and she looks like a librarian— and yet
she is notorious for pressuring her
city
library to ban a large number of books from the library,
during her executive experience as Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.
Whatever
Freedom means to her, it does not include freedom with a small "f"
of thought.
Someone named Andrew AuCoin put
together the following list, which was posted in various places
including the blog Librarian.net.
The provenance of the list is uncertain and Palin's apologists
have
been nitpicking it. Much was made of the fact that this book
includes
books written as recently as 2000 while Palin's executive
experience
began way back in 1996, in the last century. However, her
executive
experience as Mayor of Wasilla ran until 2002, and it is possible
that she had a list of books she wanted banned in 1996, which she
added to over the coming years. The claim that she totally dropped
this issue after 1996 is hard to swallow: Palin is after all a
"pit
bull with lipstick" who is not a flipflopper and who would
rather lose an election than lose a war (any war, even a cultural
war.)
Palin is notorious for being in favor
of the notorious
Bridge
to Nowhere before she was against it. On the other hand,
she was always in favor of banning books from the Wasilla
Public Library. Happily, she was unsuccessful in getting the
books banned: one of the reasons she failed was because libraries,
like most local public services in Alaska, are actually provided
at
the Borough
(county) level.
AuCoin said "This is the list
of books Palin tried to have banned. As many of you will notice
it is
a hit parade for book burners." AuCoin's list had 90
entries, but Huckleberry
Finn
was counted twice.
[Sept.
11,
2008: the provenance of the list is no longer uncertain. A page
on the website of a "book packaging" called Adler &
Robin Books has the exact same list. Adler
&
Robin's web page— whose URL is:
http://www.adlerbooks.com/banned.html—
is dated September 2004 and is identical to AuCoin's list, right
down
to the errors of including The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn twice and the misspelling
of
"Harry
Potter
and the Prisoner of Azkaban"as "Harry
Potter
and the Prizoner
of
Azkaban.
Also, the current Mayor Of Wasilla, Dianne M. Keller— the woman
who
presumably is on her way to becoming the second female Vice
President
of the United States— issued a press
release on September 9 stating that no books have ever
been
banned from the library. Keller claims that only one book was
challenged during Sarah Palin's executive experience— Heather
Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman—
but it was not removed from the shelves. The press release
doesn't
say who challenged it.]
[Oct.
15, 2008]: When Sarah Palin came to Dover, NH on
October 15, 2008, I attempted to promote my novel The
Forgotten Liars by handing out flyers
urging her to ban it.
was counted twice.
links to each of the 89 books. 
as 
—
but it was not removed from the shelves. The press release
doesn't
say who challenged it.]
