The administration is not just pulling out books by extremists, but Jewish and Catholic texts and even books acceptable to evangelics but too intylekshul.
Karl Rove must have read THE HANDMAID'S TALE and been inspired.
If this gets widespread coverage, people in the religious right of good conscience and IQs over room temperature (there are many) will see that it is time to shut the Bushies down.
It was blogged about below but also appeared in Washington Post.
The lists of acceptable texts, chosen by those “reliable subject experts,” seem inconsistent to the point of quirkiness. There’s lots of C.S. Lewis, no Karl Barth or Reinhold Niebuhr. There’s also no Robert Schuller, a minister one would think that Busheviks would find perfectly acceptable. Then, too, there’s the problem of funding. The removal of “unacceptable” faith books and the replacing of them with “acceptable” ones is, like so many Bushevik “education” mandates, unfunded:
The bureau (of prisons) has not provided additional money to prisons to buy the books on the lists, so in some prisons, after the shelves were cleared of books not on the lists, few remained.
Many prison chaplains, tasked with removing the “unacceptable” books, find this new purging policy unnecessary. As they point out, books that espouse extremist ideas or violence are rejected regularly, and all materials that were in prison libraries already had to be approved.
All this suggests the obvious - is there a 1st Amendment issue at stake? Professor Douglas Laycock of the University of Michigan law school believes that there is - mainly because (as usual) the Bush government has overreached:
Government does have a legitimate interest to screen out things that tend to incite violence in prisons. But once they say, ‘We’re going to pick 150 good books for your religion, and that’s all you get,’ the criteria has become more than just inciting violence. They’re picking out what is accessible religious teaching for prisoners, and the government can’t do that without a compelling justification. Here the justification is, the government is too busy to look at all the books, so they’re going to make their own preferred list to save a little time, a little money.
Finally, there’s the nature of the list itself. Although the government hasn’t made the list public, it’s been leaked, and even evangelical scholars are baffled at some of the choices.
Timothy Larsen, professor of Christian Thought at the evangelical Wheaton College, thinks the list is skewed:There are some well-chosen things in here. I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But there’s a lot about it that’s weird. The lists show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism, and lack materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.
http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/09/12/prisons-culling-books-on-faith-from-libraries-why/
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