“The American Library Association — the largest organization of librarians in the world — continually declares that it fights for everyone’s “Freedom to Read!” and its Library Bill of Rights requires its members to “challenge censorship.” Yet the leadership of the ALA — not the rank and file — insistently refuses to call for the immediate release of the independent librarians in Cuba — designated as “prisoners of conscience” by Amnesty International. They are serving very long prison terms because they do believe in the freedom to read — especially in a dictatorship.”

Censorship applied to children is an issue on which almost everyone is actually agreed. Parents are almost universal in their insistence that they be able to control what their children see, hear and read. Mothers like Palin want their children protected from foul language and sexual trash. Liberals want their children protected from anything that challenges their faith in the Infallible One. (No, not Obama, the other one, Charles Darwin.)

The latter is especially silly. It’s impossible to properly teach what Darwin wrote without explaining the context in which he wrote and the ideas with which he was disagreeing, particularly William Paley’s Natural Theology, a book Darwin praised in his autobiography. The latter is a romanticized form of Intelligent Design.

Palin is marvelous. She has made a boring presidential race utterly fascinating. Forget Biden and McCain. What we need is a debate between her and Obama that touches on bedrock social issues.

–Michael W. Perry, Seattle

[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

You might also want to get some historical perspective on abortion. The issue was so irrelevant in 1960, when birth control was far less effective than today, that it isn’t even mentioned in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the book that triggered modern feminism. In fact, the previous wave of feminism, the one that led to votes for women, opposed abortion, regarding it as an evil imposed on women for the convenience of men.

Palin illustrates what feminism should have done instead of supporting legalized abortion. She hasn’t let having a child at 44 stand in the way of being governor of our largest state. She keeps her new baby in a crib in her office and, as someone put it, “discretely” breast feeds the child at meetings. At the same time she’s taken on three of the largest corporations on the planet: Enron, BP and Conoco, refusing to give them a tax rebate in exchange for building a natural gas pipeline to the US. When they threatened not to build the pipeline she held tough and, if you follow the news, you know that they’ve now starting building it without that tax break. Can you think of anything Hillary has done that remotely demonstrates that much toughness? I won’t even mention Obama.

Modern feminism is populated with losers. Rather than free women, they enslaved women to being like men and playing by male rules. Even as an executive, you can’t take your baby into your office, you can only abort that child. And they call that bit of madness “choice.”

To link this to ebooks, you might want to read two ebooks I edited that contain the writings of the most radical of 19th century feminists, Victoria Woodhull. In 1872 she was the first woman to run for President and at times she called for the elimination of marriage. Yet even she opposed abortion, warning of what it meant for children. You can find what she wrote about topics such as sex and marriage in two Adobe PDF titles I released: Lady Eugenist and Free Lover. Unfortunately, because they are facsimiles (so the original texts can be displayed), you can’t display them on many readers. And because they’re Adobe PDFs, Amazon no longer sells them.

–Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

The more I read about her, the more disgusted I am becoming:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/stop-sarah-palin/

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com