After yesterday’s item about the would-be bookburners of West Bend, Wisconsin, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the acting director of the American Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom, sent us a copy of the actual complaint (which is not an actual lawsuit yet, although it contains the implied threat of one). The PDF file was itself too large for us to upload to mediabistro.com’s servers, but here’s a relevant sample that doesn’t have any bad words in it:
Those demands, as discusses yesterday, being the public burning of the book, the mayor’s resignation, and the $30,000 payouts for emotional and mental damages caused by looking at a wicked, wicked book in a public library.
“The interesting thing is that the news coverage of this outlier complaint,” Caldwell-Stone tells us, “has spread far wider than news coverage about the ongoing efforts to make the YA section disappear, along with any information about gay-positive books aimed at youth, like The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Even the people involved in that effort, West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries, has disavowed the complaint against Baby Be-Bop and the four Christian Civil Liberties Union members behind it. Caldwell-Stone also reports that the West Bend librarians will be talking about this whole mishegoss at the ALA’s annual meeting next month.