Librarians defending democracy
Re “Librarians thrust into culture wars,” Jan. 31
Ihave a question for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been at the forefront of the right-wing culture war against schools and libraries. Have you met Martha Hickson? In case she is under your radar, Hickson is a high school librarian in New Jersey who has come under attack. Where she lives and works, individuals demanded that the libraries be cleansed of books, and hence ideas, that don’t meet their definition of safe thinking.
She was quoted as saying, “These people wanting to ban books have a whole political machinery around them, and are using books as proxies to attack people.”
Hickson is a person with a clear manner of identifying the true reason for such loud intransigence. She is a “soldier” of a nation that was founded on ideas — ideas such as all people are created equal, and they have the right to express those ideas without politicians twisting the mechanics of democracy to further their own careers. Andy Siegel, Santa Barbara