If you keep up with Neil Gaiman’s blog, feel free to pass this by since it comes from this entry.
I pretty much grew up in the Aram Public Library back home. I was on the Teen Advisory Board (TAB) for it for a year and a half before I graduated it (I was there when they first began it), and when I got to college, I worked for another year and a half as a Desk Clerk/All-Around-Errand-Runner-and-Website-Updater at the library on campus. So libraries are pretty important to me overall.
And even though I’ve been around libraries for so long, and have seen a lot of interesting drama happen with them, the letter Neil Gaiman posted still surprised me.
“I walked out of our main branch one day to find several van loads of people carrying picket signs and descending on our building. There were many children with the group and some of them were given picket signs and sent out to rally cars driving by to “Honk if you hate Library Porn” and “Unsafe for Kids”. The other picketing parents sent their kids into our children’s department for us to baby-sit for the next several hours – while they tried to rally community support against us. (The irony was not lost on us.)”
I think some people should be dragged out into the street and beat with a stupidity stick until they realize that libraries are places of higher learning – therefore they should be used to learn when you’re being a complete moron about a subject. I don’t understand how they though that the library was offering porn to children. Ridiculous.
Anyway, there you have it. Stupidity at its finest.
