It would appear that the Republicans that are running Enfield have a secret agenda: enriching the ACLU, which is entitled to attorneys fees from losing defendants when it vindicates the constitution. After handing the ACLU a slam dunk victory when they insisted on having the high school graduation in a church, the Enfielders decided to censor the library in so outrageously open and notorious a manner that they might as well just write the ACLU a check now and skip the litigation.
From what I can discern, the Republicans manufactured a controversy about the showing of the film “Sicko” at the public library, then forced the town manager to pressure the librarian to cancel the film. Among other things, they made unveiled threats to wreak retribution at budget time if he failed to pull the film. Then, much to their apparent surprise, they found out that this isn’t Mississippi, and people didn’t take kindly to censorship.
Unfortunately, it appears that the Enfield Republicans have learned nothing from the graduation fiasco. Instead of retreating, they are doubling down. The town manager has gagged the town librarian, and imposed a rule that fact based films can’t be shown in the film series without presenting “multiple sides” of each issue.
I’m assuming this is his way to try to retroactively confer constitutionality on the actions of the council and himself. He must be a particularly spineless and/or incompetent town manager if he
didn’t have the brains or the balls to warn the council away from this in the first place.
The ACLU has taken an interest. I wonder how the taxpayers in Enfield feel about the Republicans once again needlessly spending their money in yet another attempt to subvert the constitution? And where, by the way, do these crazies come from and why are they congregating in Enfield? It seems like a perfectly nice place, but maybe there’s something in the air.
A Facebook group has been formed to oppose what the town did. Join up by clicking on the link. There’s an amusing exchange there between some rational types and one of the people on the video, a guy named Don Christmas, who was at the council meeting complaining about DCF taking him to court all the time (for, if he is to believed, telling his kids that despite their last name, there would be no Christmas for them if they did not shape up). Apparently he’s in favor of censorship too, but the funny part is that he can’t understand why people in the Facebook group think he’s ranting when he WRITES IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, without punctuation, and in incomplete sentences.
Al Robinson (ctblogger) has been doing yeoman work on this issue, particularly in trying to get video of the council meeting up on the internet. As this is written, he’s located it and, I understand, is trying to edit it so that the pertinent parts of the meeting can be uploaded. The full video is here. I skimmed through it, but I think I missed some of the pertinent stuff. I should add that while this whole thing clearly appears to be ginned up by Republicans, there’s a Democrat on the council who is every bit as dumb as his Republican colleagues. He agrees with the absurd assertion that it’s not censorship on their part to stop the showing so long as anyone who wants to watch the movie can see it elsewhere. By that logic, of course, they could mandate that certain books be taken off the shelves since you can always buy them on Amazon. He also seems to think that libraries are only for kids. The movie, by the way, was to be played during school hours, so one must wonder what a kid would be doing there at that point and why this “Democrat” thinks being in the same building as people watching Sicko would make a kid uncomfortable.
It goes without saying that these same people wouldn’t have uttered a peep (despite their protestations to the contrary) if the librarian had been airing a right wing film, Ben Stein’s anti-evolution (and anti-fact) film Expelled, for example.
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