McCarthyism in Miami Schools

This is a problem because the government controls the schools and libraries. The government shouldn’t be deciding what or what not a child is exposed to. To me, both the book banners and the people who want the book to remain are the same.

And all these people in the news whining about the first amendment need to tell me where government provided education is in the constitution. Government education is a way bigger infringement on peoples’ freedom than some damn childrens book.

I’d just assume let the government schools go to hell in a hand basket so we can get rid of them.

Side note: my junior high school did in fact have copies of Marx’s and Mao’s books.

I also had to do a biographical report on Leon Trotsky in 7th grade. It scarred me for life.

Privatization of education is the answer to this and many similar dilemmas. Of course that’s one of the first of the ‘kooky’ ideas the ‘reformers’ want to toss overboard.

I’m bewildered by the suggestion that this is a First Amendment issue. Does the First Amendment require that every public school library be a super Library of Congress, containing a copy of every book ever written in the English language? Obviously choices have to be made, and being full of errors is a good reason for a given book not to make the cut.

Stephen, I might get alarmed if they were actually banning this book completely. But, with taking the book out of the schools, I don’t really care much either way.

The flip side of the “mccarthyism” coin is that the government forces material on children that parents might not agree with and the first amendment is the pretext they use, even though this is completely different than the the first amendment’s original purpose. Plus my money, stolen by the government, is going to be used to pay for whatever the special interest groups decide should be put into the schools/libraries.

Either way, people are getting screwed.

>Stephen Gordon: I agree that government schools are the ultimate problem. This does not change the government censorship aspect of this case under the current political climate.

David Tomlin: One thing I want to be very clear about: At this point, I don’t just disagree with your position. I don’t entirely understand what your position is.

Since library space is limited, someone must decide what books to stock, and by implication what books not to stock. When the library is a public facility administered by the government, whether it’s a school library or a regular public library, the decision-maker must be an officer or agent of the government.

Your position seems to be that it is appropriate for some officers to make these judgments, but not others. When the ‘wrong’ officers make the choice, it’s banning/censorship.

What I’m not clear on is which officers are which, and the underlying reason for the distinction. The school board is wrong. Who’s right? The librarians?

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Libertarians would want to allow that book to be in schools because in doing so it is libertarian. People should be able to read whatever book they please. Are ‘textbooks’ completely accurate? How accurate is the Bible?

Or we could be like the Nazis and just burn most books to the ground.

I like that op-ed that says people trying to get rid of communist books are using communist tactics by getting rid of them. Doesnt that just explain our country to a ‘T’.

If I am wrong about this issue, that doesn’t make me a Nazi. That insinuation is not only offensive, it’s asinine. In my opinion it reflects badly on the LP.

From Wikipedia(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt_University:

Nazi times

After 1933, it was, like all German universities, transformed into a Nazi educational institution. It was from the University’s library that some 20,000 books by “degenerates” and opponents of the regime were taken to be burned on May 10 of that year in the Opernplatz (now the Bebelplatz) for a demonstration protected by the SA that also featured a speech by Joseph Göbbels. A monument to this can now be found in the center of the square, consisting of a glass panel opening onto an underground white room with empty shelf space for 20,000 volumes and a plaque, bearing an epigraph from an 1820 work by Heinrich Heine: “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen” (“That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they ultimately burn people”). Jewish students and scholars and political opponents of Nazis were ejected from the university and often deported and killed.

This post is a clever way to imply that the LP is not hostile to left-libertarians.

Does anyone think that, if a school librarian stocked a book of Holocaust revisionism, liberals wouldn’t raise hell and demand some other authority reverse the decision?

Of course they would talk about ‘hate speech’, but I think the matter of accuracy would be raised also.

I’ve wondered about school libraries stocking ‘The Bell Curve’. I googled about it and didn’t find any information one way or the other.

>Stephen VanDyke: If you are in favor of banning, then you’re in league with the likes of Nazis. There, I said it.

David Tomlin: Thank you. You get points for guts, though not for brains.

>SV: Either we have an open society where people are free to make their own judgements on what is proper for their own personal reading material . . .

DT: Lets call people’s freedom to ‘make their own judgments on what is proper for their own personal reading material’ their FTMTOJOWIPFTOPRM.

The people who were taxed to pay for the school library could have used that money to buy books of their choice. Their FTMTOJOWIPFTOPRM has been reduced.

If Book A is ‘banned’ from a library to which I have access, then that reduces my FTMTOJOWIPFTOPRM if I want to read Book A.

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Sorry, ‘increase of decrease’ should be ‘increase or decrease’.

It occurs to me that I have been approaching this issue in entirely the wrong way, picking around the edges instead of striking to the heart. Mr. Gordon has adopted the view that for the government to decline to subsidize Activity X, is the same as depriving people of the ‘freedom’ to do X. This perverts, and thus undermines, the very idea of individual liberty.

I’m not saying that supporting the decision of the Miami school board is the only ‘correct’ libertarian position. There might be a number of grounds for criticizing the decision, or for arguing that the authority to make such decisions should lodge elsewhere than the school board. But those grounds must be other than ‘freedom = a right to a subsidy’.

Mr. Gordon is quite unsuited to be a spokesman for any party that calls itself ‘Libertarian’.

DaveT — I thought the same thing initially. Then I realized that if you roll up a long sleeve, it can conceal a bit of cloth on the upper-arm by virtue of material dislocation!

THE MIAMI HERALD
July 8, 2006

TAXES FOR VAMOS A CUBA: “SINFUL AND TYRANNICAL”
By Frank Bolanos

Mr. Frank Bolanos is a member of the Miami-Dade School Board

If the Newark, New Jersey school board decided to issue “Little Black Sambo” as a third grade reader, how would that largely African-American community react?

Famed progressive educator Carl L. Marburger posed this question in 1974, when he said controversial schoolbooks in rural West Virginia showed the public school system’s “astonishing insensitivity to local cultural values.”

Those aggrieved local folks endured the insults, catcalls and jeers of the liberal elite until Marburger, a self-described liberal’s liberal, spoke up and gave them pause. Today, the Miami-Dade school board and I are being accused of censorship for our efforts to remove from school libraries “Vamos a Cuba,” a children’s book that paints a false and distorted portrait of life in communist Cuba.

If the teachers’ unions, Herald columnists, the ACLU and Fidel Castro himself are to be believed, the Miami-Dade school board is pillaging school libraries, burning books, oppressing the intellectual freedom of helpless children, and stomping on the First Amendment.

None of this is true; this is not a First Amendment issue. Censorship occurs when government refuses to allow people to purchase material, not when it refuses to provide that material at no charge.

Just as the First Amendment grants basic freedoms to those espousing even the most repugnant of views, I support Alta Schreier’s right to author and publish “Vamos a Cuba.” I defend the right of any Miami bookstore to sell it and I defend the right of any American to read it. Indeed, let the author promote and sell her book and compete in the marketplace of ideas.

But taxpayers must not be forced to subsidize falsehoods, propaganda or insulting imagery. As Thomas Jefferson, wrote, “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

Simply put, Jefferson, a framer of the Constitution our critics cite, would see no reason for our schools to spend sparse taxpayer money to promote the circulation of misinformation and lies many in our community equate to oppression and the loss of liberty and life.

If our public schools provided “Little Black Sambo” to African-America children, I would stand with their parents as this would be offensive, racist and an inappropriate use of tax dollars. If our public schools put the grotesquely anti-Semitic children’s book “The Poisonous Mushroom” into libraries, I would stand with Jewish parents to oppose this abhorrent act and misappropriation of public funds. The struggle against Cuban communism is no less important.

In 1995, the Miami Herald was forced to trash an entire section after an offensive cartoon of Martin Luther King, Jr. was mistakenly printed inside. Over the nationally syndicated cartoonist’s objections, editors made the bold decision to pull a half million copies of the magazine.

They did it by hand; it took two full days. It was hard and expensive work to correct a mistake that took only moments to make. Similarly, a foolish decision by an entrenched bureaucracy had to be corrected and has cost our school district valuable time, money and focus.

After the mess, the Herald’s executive editor at the time wrote that the newspaper’s First Amendment obligation is “to present the broadest range of perspectives and opinions in its news and opinion pages. But a newspaper also has an obligation to protect its readers from the outrageously offensive or the egregiously insensitive.”

If such an obligation exists at a privately funded newspaper, certainly Miami’s public officials have a responsibility to assure taxpayers aren’t forced to subsidize racism, anti-Semitism or communism with public dollars.

Likewise, taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for entrenched and misguided bureaucrats who want to whitewash the horrors of life under Fidel Castro and his brutal regime.

END