Thanks to Cynthia Samuels for reminding me that it's Banned Books Week. It's a noteworthy year for this issue, because we've got a book banning supporter running for Vice President. It's interesting, because the whole incident---Palin fired a librarian because she wouldn't take certain books off the shelf, but the community was outraged so Palin had to hire her back---really showed where there are fissures growing in Western communities where more libertarian-minded people clash with the utter right wing nutjobs. Differences have been kept under wraps for a long time, mainly because they all vote Republican, even though the libertarians are fooling themselves. But now the seams are showing. The wingnuts have always tried to do a political kung fu move to explain that book banning is so about liberty, because it's about local control, and we all know how that's a fetish for right wingers of all stripes. But the fact of the matter is that it's just more evidence, and really obvious evidence at that, that "states' rights" is and always has been about denying people individual rights, in this case to read what they want to.
