Senate Hearings on Book Banning From Yesterday

Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee hosted hearings entitled, "Book Bans: Examining How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature."

I urge all of you to visit the page for these hearings where you can view the 2 and a half hour hearings and read the written testimony of the those who participated. 

In particular I suggest you read the testimony of Dr. Emily Knox and Alexi Giannoulias. And if you live in or near IL, both will be speaking at ILA Annual win Springfield this October. Click here to register for that.

Look as bad as things are with the systematic and organized attempts to legally ban books, we need to take a moment and realize how important it is that these hearings happened and that all of us can watch the recording and read the testimony with just a click. Take advantage of the free access to important hearings that have entered he public record. 

Also, after the hearings, which not coincidentally featured the state Librarian of IL, 5 more bomb threats were called into IL libraries and two of them were at two of the biggest libraries in the state (Aurora and Schaumburg). 

I waited until today to have this post though so that I could include some of the reporting about the hearings as well. Giving you a one stop shop to pursue both the primary sources and the post-hearings reports. You cannot ignore this no matter where you live. My state has banned book bans and our libraries have been facing bomb threats for weeks now. A few a week. It is unnerving and upsetting to every library worker in the state. No one is immune here.

So again, go to the hearing website and look at the reports below for summaries.

• Courthouse News Service's report on the hearings
• USA Today's coverage
• Chicago Sun Times coverage (2 of the presenters and the head of committee are from IL)
• Because this also is important to schools, here is Education Week's coverage.
• See what the Guardian [UK] wrote up about the hearings
• Click here to run search for more articles about the hearings, including from conservative sources which look at the hearings from a completely different perspective. You need to know both sides here, so click here.