As Banned Books Week looms on the horizon, the issue of then-Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin’s attempted book banning is heating up.

While Palin did not ask for specific books to be removed, there is a back story emerging thanks to ABC News, among others — there were specific books at issue in the community and at her church in particular.

The Nation has the relevant section of the transcript of the ABC News report by Brian Ross, and the video.

ROSS: Around the time Palin became mayor, [Palin's] church and other conservative Christians began to focus on certain books available in local stores and in the town library, including one called “Go Ask Alice,” and another one written by a local pastor, Howard Bess, called Pastor, IAm Gay.
BESS: This whole thing of controlling, you know, information, censorship, yeah. That’s a part of the scene.

ROSS: Not long after taking office, Palin raised the issue at a city council meeting of how books might be banned according to news accounts and a local resident, a Democrat, who was there.

ANNE KILKENNY: Mayor Palin asked the librarian, what is your response if I ask you to remove some books from the collection of the Wasilla Public Library?
ROSS: The Wasilla librarian, Mary Ellen Edmonds, the then president of the Alaska Library Association, responded with only a short hesitation.

KILKENNY: The librarian took a deep breath and said, the books in the collection were purchased in accordance with national standards and professional guidelines, and I would absolutely not allow you to remove any books from the collection.

“A few weeks after the council meeting, the mayor fired the librarian, although she was reinstated after a community uproar,” Ross reported. “The Wasilla librarian, Mary Ellen Edmonds, left two years later, and according to friends, because it was just too hard working for Sarah Palin.”

The Associated Press story features the McCain campaign’s efforts to downplay the episode, but also provides the corroborating details first exposed by ABC. The McCain camaign acknowledges that Palin raised the issue of book banning not once, but three times with the head librarian. As ABC makes clear, she was fired and then reinstated due to popular support, meanwhile — the entire staff was in fear for their own jobs. According to the AP:

The Rev. Howard Bess, a liberal Christian preacher in the nearby town of Palmer, said the church Palin and her family attended until 2002, the Wasilla Assembly of God, was pushing to remove his book from local bookstores.

Emmons told him that year that several copies of “Pastor I Am Gay” had disappeared from the library shelves, Bess said.

“Sarah brought pressure on the library about things she didn’t like,” Bess said. “To believe that my book was not targeted in this is a joke.”

Paul Rosenberg of the group blog Open Left, plans to post the Daily Kos version of my book announcement at about 2pm EST this Saturday.  I will be on hand to join in the conversation on this important and active political blog.

Dispatches from the Religious Left:  The Future of Faith and Politics in America

The MP3 podcast and transcript can be found here.

I am honored to appear on the nationally syndicated radio show, Between the Lines, with Scott Harris on Monday,  September 8th at 8pm EDT.  We will be talking about the religious right views of Sarah Palin. (The show may air at different times on different days elsewhere.)

On the apparent eve of a more progressive era, there are a lot of Beltway Insiders who want the Democratic Party and its candidates to pander to the Religious Right.  But Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, addressing a gathering of the Stonewall Democrats at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, urged them to fight.   The Boston Phoenix reports: 

“This is your party, and this is your country,” he told the GLBT gathering. “And don’t let anybody push you to the margins.”

Patrick went on to ask the GLBT community “to remember that there are others too, in whose struggle you have a stake… who have been pushed to the margins,” including racial minorities, the disabled, and the poor. “There is an awful lot of unfinished business in the fairness agenda” Patrick said.

The Institute for Public Accuracy kindly included my comments about Rick Warren’s recent presidential candidate forum in one of their daily press releases, which is posted over at Common Dreams.  I said:

“The fiercely partisan religious right leader Rick Warren of four years ago is little different from the Rick Warren of today. In 2004, he issued a letter regarding the presidential candidates on the issues he considered to be ‘non-negotiable’ and that ‘are not even debatable because God’s word is clear on these issues.’

“At the Civic Forum, Warren featured the key litmus tests of the religious right — abortion and same sex marriage — while ignoring the so-called broader agenda of the supposedly newly moderate evangelicals such as climate change and domestic and world poverty. He said that we should not ‘demonize’ people with whom we disagree, and yet he described abortion as a ‘holocaust.’

“Warren opened the forum by saying he supports separation of church and state, while the event itself held in the sanctuary of a church epitomized the all-out war on separation being waged by the religious right and its current avuncular leader. [McCain and Obama] have contributed greatly to the role of Warren as a power broker, reflecting poorly on the judgment of both.”

Things have changed, and are changing still here at FrederickClarkson.com

But we will be up and running normally soon, with pretty much the old look; the old posts archived; and we here at FrederickClarkson.com will be posting more or less daily about state and national politics and the wild, wild world of the Religious Right.

The new site will also serve as HQ for my new book, an anthology I edited, Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America, due out from Ig Publishing in October.  We will have a lot of news about the book coming soon!

As it happens, life has intervened and I am going to be unable to make it to Netroots Nation. However, Ryan Valentine of the Texas Freedom Network has graciously agreed to stand in, and to read my panel presentation for me. For those of us (including me!) who are unable to be there, it turns out that much of the Netroots Nation agenda will be video taped and live streamed via ustreamtv — including Whatever Happened to the Religious Left. It will also be archived and available after the convention. I will post further details as they become available.

Here is what I had previously announced over at Talk to Action.

The annual Netroots Nation conference (formerly the Yearly Kos) will be held this year in Austin, Texas, July 17-20th.  I’m pleased to announce that  Pastordan and I will be leading a panel titled Whatever Happened to the Religious Left?.    I will talk about what the Religious Right has got that the Religious Left hasn’t got — and offer a few ideas of how to get it.

There is nothing on the Left corresponding to the politically dynamic Religious Right. But there are some promising elements with the potential to become greater than the sum of their parts.

This panel seeks to address what’s going on and what should happen next. We will discuss how common approaches to electoral politics can be found and practiced in a way that respects the unique character of progressive faith.
Whatever Happened to the Religious Left?
Sat, 07/19/2008 – 4:30pm, Ballroom E

Watch this space for a lot more posting and some signficant news related to this subject.

The Commencement season has rolled around again, and so it is time for my now annual tradition of posting about a commencement address for all seasons; for all schools and for all time.

Commencement addresses are tricky things. Most speakers go in knowing that expectations are at once very low and very high. People would love to hear a remarkable address, but they know they are unlikely to hear one, the best efforts of the speaker not withstanding. But sometimes a commencement speaker rises to the occasion and captivates an audience — and is remembered — if for no other reason, than for having done so.

Dr. William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International cut-through the summer haze with just such a speech Oberlin College in 2005. His remarks — not only moved the audience but lit-up the blogophere. A member of the class of 2005 was so moved that he posted the speech on the Daily Kos where it topped the rec list. As one commenter wrote: “All that I can say is that I wish my days were blessed with more words that could leave me feeling like I feel right now after reading that.”

Dr. Schulz had been much in the news that week, due to Amnesty’s release of a report on human rights abuses and torture of prisoners by the United States at Gitmo and beyond. Amnesty called for an international investigation and the prosecution of any U.S. government officials found responsible.

But Schulz, a 1971 Oberlin graduate was at his alma mater to connect the values of the college to his hopes for the mission of the students as they enter the world beyond. Along the way, he told a story that I will never forget:

“In the midst of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda,” Schulz recalled, “a group of machete-wielding militiamen attacked a girl’s school in the middle of the night. The teenagers were rousted from their beds about 2:00 AM and forced to line up in the dining hall. They were ordered to separate themselves, Hutu from Tutsi, so that only the Tutsi would die.

But the girls refused.

A second time the commander ordered them to divide up by ethnic group. But still they refused. And finally one of the girls found her voice and, though very frightened, this is what it was reported later that she said:

“We cannot separate ourselves, you see, because we are not Hutu; we are not Tutsi; we are Rwandan” at which point every one of them was slaughtered.”

“But what a legacy they leave! ‘We are not Hutu; we are not Tutsi. We are Rwandan.’ In that simple sentiment that young girl bespoke a graciousness upon which depends the salvation of the world.”

Here in the United States we do not face such unspeakable horrors. But we do live in difficult times, with much at stake. For those of us who did not happen to graduate from anything this year, and even for those of us who did, let’s adopt Dr. Schulz as our commencement speaker, and as we go forward to face the challenges of our time — let’s have the courage to be Rwandan.