Community Advocates for Libraries in Miami

From pages to designs ➡️ don’t forget to check out all of the amazing vendors that will be at the Book Club Fair on April 11th! TaDa: The Art of Book Folding will be there, will you?!

At Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York on Sunday, a comic dismissed Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” another speaker likened Kamala Harris to a pr******te with “pimp handlers” and Tucker Carlson mocked Harris with a made-up ethnicity.

Trump at MSG: A Closing Carnival of Grievances and Racism The inflammatory rally was a capstone for an increasingly aggrieved campaign for Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has grown darker and more menacing.

All benefits to county workers are on the chopping block as the July 1 state law takes effect to demolish the unions.

Unless 60% of employee are signed up, the union is dismantled.

Organized collective bargaining resulted in health insurance, personal days, ability to roll over annual leave, etc. The three year contract about your employment is at stake.
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As you may be aware, the Legislature passed, and the Governor signed a new law affecting all public sector unions throughout the State except for the first responders. Some provisions of the law will be effective on July 1st, 2023. The provisions of the law which immediately impact our union are the prohibition of payroll dues deduction by government employers and requiring 60% of the bargaining unit to be dues-paying members, or the association will be decertified.

GSAF Workplace Legal Representation: GSAF provides its members with representation during disciplinary and administrative matters related to their employment such as Contractual Grievance Filing, Arbitrations and Appeals, Labor Management Committee Meetings, Classification Appeals and Impact Bargaining of Terms and Conditions of Employment. When appropriate GSAF's attorneys will also provide the member with representation.

GSAF Collective Bargaining Negotiations: GSAF's management team and its labor attorneys negotiate on behalf of its members with the county/city to obtain the most favorable legally binding collective bargaining agreements. We advocate for legal and administrative terms and articles to maximize, to the greatest extent possible, protections and benefits for our members.

OPEIU Free College Benefit: OPEIU members and their families can now earn an associate degree completely free of charge. Every member or retired member, as well as spouses, children, grandchildren and dependents of OPEIU members, can earn a two-year degree online for free. You read that right – free college just for being an OPEIU member in good standing with absolutely no out-of –pocket cost for tuition, fees or e-books. Go to FreeCollege.OPEIU.org for more information or call 888-590-9009

OPEIU Student Debt Reduction Program: This new benefit will help OPEIU members repay their student debt. The fund provides five awards of $2,500 each year to a member who has completed an associate or undergraduate degree and who can demonstrate they have at least $10,000 in student debt and their account is current.

Union Scholarships: Howard Coughlin Memorial Scholarship up to $6,500, John Kelly Labor Studies Scholarship Fund up to $3,250, Romeo Corbeil/Gilles Beauregard Scholarship Fund, Union Plus Scholarship Program with $150,000 awarded annually.

24 HR Sign & Drive Roadside Plan: Two towing/service calls per year for members and family living in the same household, valued up to $100 each.

Identity Theft Protection Service: An Internet Monitoring Service monitors the web for sensitive information about you sold on the black market: credit card, social security and bank account numbers, driver license, telephone, email etc. You then receive a monthly report. Register at www.OPEIUidProtect.com or by calling 855-990-0994

Member Legal Services: This benefit provides 30 minutes of free legal consultation on non-employment related issues.

Notary Public Services: Free Notary Public services for GSAF members.

Annual Member Appreciation Picnic: Every year the GSAF local organizes this great event for its members and their families with great food, fun, games and prizes.

Death Benefit: GSAF members with14 months of membership in good standing automatically qualify for and receive $3,000 in death benefit coverage. Plus $2,000 payable by ALICO insurance. This is a total of $5,000 Death Benefit coverage!

Accidental Death &Dismemberment Benefit: GSAF members with 14 months of membership in good standing receive $4,000 of coverage!

Medical Disability Benefit: GSAF members with 14 months of membership in good standing receive a $250 medical disability benefit.
Flowers and Bereavement Benefit

AFL-CIO Union Plus Benefits Program: Members can log on to: www.UnionPlus.org for web access showing and expanded list of additional benefits.

Working Advantage Discount Program: Members are able to register using the code 744387769 at www.workingadvantage.com or call 800.565.3712. Get up to 60% discount on movie tickets, theme parks, hotels, museums, zoos, attractions, shopping, theatre events and more.

OPEIU Disaster Relief Fund
Twenty-Five dollar ($25.00) bonus for Members signing up a New Member
Free Financial Advisor Analysis
Leadership and Union Organizing Trainings
CPR/Bleed Control Certified Training
White Collar newsletter subscription
Free OPEIU App download

Working Advantage - Employee Discount Program Employee discount benefit and gift programs, providing corporate discounts on movie tickets, theme park tickets, Broadway tickets, ski tickets and gift certificates to companies of any size

Author Headshot
By David Firestone
A member of the editorial board
In 1968, after riots scorched the streets of so many American cities, Richard Nixon and other Republicans tried to reassure white voters by campaigning on a return to “law and order.” That phrase always carried many layers of racial coding, and Nixon’s narrow interpretation of criminal behavior became evident by 1975 when at least 17 of his top aides and campaign staff members were convicted or pleaded guilty to crimes stemming from the Watergate burglary. Nixon himself came close to being indicted after resigning, but was pardoned by Gerald Ford.

A half-century later, not much has changed in the way Republicans practice the politics of crime. “Florida is a law-and-order state,” says Gov. Ron DeSantis. “We must have law and order,” says Nikki Haley, the former governor of North Carolina. “We need to get tough on crime,” according to Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.

But the crimes they want to get tough on are always of the same kind: “violent” crimes on the streets of American cities, preferably cities run by Democrats. The kind of crimes that make suburban residents install doorbell cameras, stock up on guns, and vote for the politician who says “lock them up” the loudest.

But not the kind of crimes perpetrated by a corporation that pollutes a river. Not the kind perpetrated by tax cheats or insider traders or hate groups. Federal crimes just aren’t as compelling a campaign issue, and never seem to come up in the Republican list of the nation’s plagues. (They also don’t mention that the per capita murder rate is actually higher in red states.)

The Trump era has further narrowed how his party views crime. Because the F.B.I. and Justice Department have investigated Donald Trump for years, Republicans now say that the F.B.I. has to be dismantled and rebuilt, and that no prosecution by the Justice Department can really be trusted. Trump’s indictment for purloining national secrets from the White House certainly isn’t a crime to Republicans, and neither was the Jan. 6, 2021 invasion of the United States Capitol. Both Trump and DeSantis are talking about pardoning the insurrectionists who vandalized American government in the hope of keeping Trump in office.

It can all get a little confusing, but hopefully this guide to the Republican definition of a crime will help.

Opinion | A Handy Guide to the Republican Definition of a Crime The party of law and order has given new meaning to “law and order.”

Environmental Conservation in Your Own Backyard By Jose C. Romano, President & CEO of the Zoo Miami Foundation I live in Kendall and I love it here. Mostly known for Dadeland, Town and Country, Miami Dade College and The Falls; no one really considers this suburban neighborhood (and for that matter most neighborhoods in South Florida) as the Fron...

Critics point out that the same public officials who have sought to restrict abortion out of existence have also opposed providing adequate funding to those very social services that crisis pregnancy centers tout.

DeSantis signed a near-total abortion ban. Here’s what those directly affected think of it Abortion clinics and crisis pregnancy centers have a starkly different view of the meaning of choice.

Florida Freedom to Read Project on Twitter “Miami-Dade met in April to review 5 books: THE ABCs OF BLACK HISTORY, CUBAN KIDS, COUNTRIES IN THE NEWS: CUBA, THE HILL WE CLIMB, and LOVE TO LANGSTON All books were challenged for CRT or “gender theory” by the same person in March 2023.”

Ron DeSantis’s context-free history book vanished online. We got a copy.
Gillian Brockell

(Illustration by Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post; iStock)
In the lead-up to this spring’s release of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s book “The Courage to Be Free,” a funny thing happened on the internet: His first book, published in 2011 before his political career began, disappeared.

“Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama,” was once available at the click of a button as an e-book, but no more. A used hard copy is selling for $1,950 at the only online bookseller that appears to have it. The publisher, a small vanity label in Florida called High-Pitched Hum Publishing, did not respond to phone calls or social media messages about why the e-book was removed.

Fortunately, The Washington Post purchased a digital copy last summer, in anticipation that it may someday become more relevant. Now, with DeSantis (R) expected to declare his bid for the presidency officially this week, that time has come.

“Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” in title, cover and content, is essentially a troll of former president Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir “Dreams From My Father,” which recounted Obama’s upbringing and young adulthood before he entered Harvard Law School.

In his book, DeSantis, who has moved to stop history lessons in Florida that might make students uncomfortable and who attacked an AP African American Studies course he said “lacks historical value,” dismisses slavery as a “personal flaw” of the Founding Fathers, irrelevant to the really important stuff: context-free, cherry-picked quotes from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.

His writing is coherent, pretty lively and includes — angels and harps! — footnotes to his sourcing. This alone makes it better than the vast majority of politicians’ attempts at writing history. And though DeSantis aligned himself with the tea party movement when he wrote the book, he does not subscribe to its conspiracy theories claiming Obama was a secret Muslim or born in Kenya. He also does not think “death panels” are real — though “concerns about them are not foolhardy,” he writes.

But DeSantis’s thesis is twofold: that Obama was conducting a dangerous power grab, and that the Founding Fathers would have been appalled if they were still alive to see it.

The largely forgotten book ban case that went up to the Supreme Court

According to DeSantis, evidence of Obama’s power grab includes the auto-industry bailout, the 2009 stimulus package and Obamacare. The president’s anti-American principles, DeSantis alleges, come from the usual boogeymen — activist-writer Saul Alinsky, formerly incarcerated professor Bill Ayers, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — plus poet Frank Marshall Davis and the father who abandoned Obama when he was 2. DeSantis then writes a laundry list of bad things these men once said and pins them onto Obama.

If that seems like a bit of a stretch, the balance of the book is devoted to performing a similar maneuver on the Founding Fathers, glomming DeSantis’s loathing for the 44th president onto quotes from Madison and Hamilton. Other Founders are mentioned only in passing and only so far as they can be made to support DeSantis’s argument, with one exception: a late chapter about George Washington.

Any history book about the Founders must acknowledge that many of them were enslavers, and DeSantis gets to it in the introduction with a whiff.

“Slavery,” he writes, “had been a fact of life throughout human history.” It’s a variation on the false argument that “people didn’t know it was wrong back then.” In any case, the form of slavery practiced in the early republic — lifelong, inherited, race-based, chattel slavery — was particularly severe and relatively new, as far as human history goes.

Did Ben Franklin really say, ‘A republic, if you can keep it’?

Some of the Founding Fathers, like Gouverneur Morris and Benjamin Franklin, opposed slavery anyway, DeSantis writes. True enough, though he hardly mentions either man again until the conclusion of the book, when he repeats that some of the Founding Fathers opposed slavery. It’s as if Morris and Franklin have nothing to offer DeSantis by way of writing, philosophy or the “First Principles” of his book’s title (read: limited government) and are simply useful as permission slips to skip the yucky parts.

DeSantis concludes his brief discussion of slavery with: “Though it was not immediately abolished, slavery was doomed to fail in a nation whose Constitution embodied such philosophical truths” as liberty. Many of the Founders believed in the inevitability of slavery’s gradual end, but anyone today capable of typing “cotton gin” should know that isn’t what happened. By the time of the Civil War, fully eight decades after the revolution, American slavery was bigger, crueller, more entrenched and more profitable than ever.

Cherry-picking to bash Obama

It would be impossible (or at least brain-meltingly boring) to run down every single quote in DeSantis’s book and see whether he gave it proper context. But, for those The Post reviewed, it can safely be said that he did not.

One example: DeSantis seethes in Chapter 9 about Obama urging young people to aim for a life of public service instead of pursuing “big money” and a “fancy enough car.” “This negative view of financial success is yet another instance of Obama not being in tune with the Framers,” he concludes, splicing in bits of Hamilton quotes, not even full sentences, about Americans’ “industrious habits” and “pursuits of gain.”

Hamilton despised slavery but didn’t confront George Washington or other slaveholders

The phrases come from Federalist No. 8, which is about preventing conflicts between states. In its full context, Hamilton is exploring the pitfalls of keeping a standing army: “The industrious habits of the people of the present day, absorbed in the pursuits of gain, and devoted to the improvements of agriculture and commerce, are incompatible with the condition of a nation of soldiers, which was the true condition of the people of those [previous] republics.”

DeSantis also seems here to diminish his own life of public service. The U.S. Navy has been his employer; since he published the book, he’s been employed by Congress and the state of Florida.

James Madison’s plantation vowed to share power with Black descendants. Then things blew up.

DeSantis devotes a chunk of his book to the sacredness of property rights and Obama’s alleged disrespect for them (regulations on credit-card companies, the individual mandate), but in doing so he commits a much bigger cherry-picking blunder on slavery. He describes an elderly James Madison heroically lifting his creaky bones from retirement to speak at Virginia’s 1829 Constitutional Convention. There, DeSantis recounts, Madison “advised the delegates that ‘these natural rights cannot be separated. The personal right to acquire property, which is a natural right, gives to property, when acquired, a right to protection, a social right.’”

Madison, though, was not talking about the deed to your house or an unfair tax. The 1829 convention was called because in Virginia only White men who owned property were allowed to vote, and a bunch of White men who didn’t own property wanted to vote, too. Madison didn’t want such men to have the right to take away his slaves or make slavery less profitable.

See for yourself. Here is Madison, two paragraphs after the quote DeSantis cites:

“To come more nearly to the subject before the Committee, viz. that peculiar feature in our Community which calls for a peculiar provision, in the basis of our Government, I mean the colored part of our population; It is apprehended, if the power of the Commonwealth shall be in the hands of a Majority who have no interest in this species of property, that, from the facility with which it may be oppressed by excessive taxation, injustice may be done to its owners.”

Only people who own people, Madison is arguing, should be allowed to vote on matters concerning the owned people. It is a very specific kind of property.

Either DeSantis was unaware of that context of the quote, or he intentionally left it out. The former suggests sloppy research; the latter suggests the kind of “distort[ed] history” he has claimed “woke” educators in his state are trying to impose.

The ending chapters focus on Washington’s miraculous humility, how he voluntarily gave up his commander in chief status after the end of the Revolutionary War, and how he limited himself to two terms as president, setting a standard that only one president (a Democrat!) ignored. DeSantis describes this well and accurately and, if anything, understates Washington’s reticence to take power; historians like Alexis Coe have shown that Washington wanted to step down after one term, had to be persuaded to serve another and regretted it when he did.

DeSantis brings up Washington’s humility to warn against Obama’s “self-reverence,” “cockiness,” and “inflated sense of himself,” which, he claims, could threaten the republic if Obama were reelected in 2012. (It did not.) Twelve years have passed since DeSantis gave this warning, and in those 12 years, DeSantis’s record of taking principled stands against ego-driven presidents has not held up.

DeSantis sought and relished an endorsement from former president Donald Trump, who claimed in his nomination acceptance speech, “I alone can fix it.” DeSantis ran fawning ads in which he read to his children not from the Federalist Papers but from Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.” Even now, as he is expected to mount a primary campaign against his former ally, DeSantis has not condemned the former president’s false claims about the 2020 election or his unprecedented efforts to stay in the White House.

MLK and an avoidance of race

The premise of “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers” devolves as it goes on. A later chapter claims the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville would also have hated Obamacare. It’s an odd inclusion in a book purportedly about the Founding Fathers, considering Tocqueville was not one of them.

There are long asides about Supreme Court cases, and even a nod to Martin Luther King Jr. — the sanitized version trotted out in annual tweets, anyway. DeSantis quotes King as complimenting the Constitution’s “magnificent words.” According to DeSantis’s footnotes, he grabbed it not from its context — pushing for civil rights legislation in the “I Have a Dream” speech — but from the Yale Book of Quotations.

DeSantis’s book depicts history as Useful Quotes from Great Men, not a rigorous study of the past in all its complexities, contexts, perspectives and, yes, hypocrisies. His attacks on history education should come as no surprise; given the chance to literally write history here, he took great pains to ignore African American history up until it could produce King’s quote.

Madison largely wrote the “magnificent words” under which the United States has governed for 234 years. When Madison relaxed at home, most of the people around him were enslaved Black people, whose labor — and the profits their labor produced — allowed him the time to develop, as DeSantis put it, “a deep knowledge of the full spectrum of philosophical, political, economic and religious thought running through the [Constitutional] Convention.”

These realities coexisted uncomfortably long before our current history wars. Perhaps in a society — or in a state, or with a candidate — at peace with its past, there would be nothing controversial in saying so.

Analysis | Ron DeSantis’s context-free history book vanished online. We got a copy. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has attacked history lessons in Florida and is preparing a run for president, dismisses slavery in his 2011 book as a “personal flaw” of the Founding Fathers.

From the Washington Post:

School librarians face a new penalty in the banned-book wars: Prison
Several states have passed laws that could sentence people for years if they provide ‘obscene’ books to minors

Hannah Natanson

(Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)
Librarians could face years of imprisonment and tens of thousands in fines for providing s*xually explicit, obscene or “harmful” books to children under new state laws that permit criminal prosecution of school and library personnel.

At least seven states have passed such laws in the last two years, according to a Washington Post analysis, six of them in the past two months — although governors of Idaho and North Dakota vetoed the legislation. Another dozen states considered more than 20 similar bills this year, half of which are likely to come up again in 2024, The Post found.

Some of the laws impose severe penalties on librarians, who until now were exempted in almost every state from prosecution over obscene material — a carve-out meant to permit accurate lessons in topics such as s*x education. All but one of the new laws target schools, while some also target the staff of public libraries and one affects book vendors.

One example is an Arkansas measure that says school and public librarians, as well as teachers, can be imprisoned for up to six years or fined $10,000 if they distribute obscene or harmful texts. It takes effect Aug. 1.

Library and free speech advocates were unaware of any instances so far in which a school staffer had been charged under the new laws. Most of the laws do not spell out precisely who will decide what counts as obscene but suggest the judgment should come from the courts.

Some educators and activists say the laws will forge a climate of fear among school librarians, spurring the censorship of books by and about LGBTQ individuals — even as the nation already faces a historic onslaught of challenges to books in those categories.

“It will make sure the only literature students are exposed to fits into a narrow scope of what some people want the world to look like,” said Keith Gambill, president of the teachers union in Indiana, one of the states that adopted obscenity laws. “This is my 37th year in education. I’ve never seen anything like this. … We are entering a very frightening period.”

Cries to remove books from classrooms and library shelves is nothing new. Some of what has shifted are the storylines, characters and authors being silenced. (Video: Allie Caren/The Washington Post, Photo: Illustration: Brian Monroe/The Washington Post)
Those on the political right, however, contend that the legislation is necessary to prevent children from exposure to pornographic and s*xual content that will harm their mental health and warp their development. In every case but one, a bipartisan bill in Missouri, Republican lawmakers or Republican-dominated committees introduced the laws.

State library and school obscenity laws

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School employees should be held accountable, said Idaho state Rep. Jaron Crane (R), who co-sponsored a bill this year that would have allowed parents to sue districts for $2,500 over s*xually explicit material. His bill passed the legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Brad Little (R), who warned that the law would burden libraries financially and have “unintended consequences.” Little did not respond to a request for comment.

Crane wrote in a statement to The Post that the legislature failed to override the governor’s veto by one vote.

“If teachers and librarians are scared to do their jobs,” Crane added, “that confirms the fact that there is indeed material in their libraries that is harmful to minors.”

In addition to Idaho and Arkansas, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota and Oklahoma enacted laws mandating fines or imprisonment, or both, for school employees and librarians. Tennessee has passed two measures, one that targets schools and another that targets book publishers or vendors selling to schools.

The consequences vary slightly between states: The Indiana law, signed by the governor in May, says school staffers can be forced to pay up to $10,000 or serve 2½ years in prison for providing obscene or harmful material to minors. A 2022 Oklahoma law says school employees and public library staffers can be fined up to $20,000 or serve up to 10 years in prison for facilitating “indecent exposure to obscene material or child pornography.” One of the Tennessee laws, passed this year, says book publishers, distributors and sellers can face up to six years in prison and up to $103,000 in fines for providing obscene matter to K-12 schools.

Library administrators across the country say the flood of obscenity laws are already instilling terror in librarians.

In Arkansas, a dozen librarians have sought help from Nate Coulter, executive director of the Central Arkansas Library System, worried they will be prosecuted once their state’s law takes effect this summer. Coulter said he promised legal support. In Indiana, school librarians have begun removing books that deal with LGBTQ issues, s*x, race and violence — sometimes of their own volition, sometimes at the direction of their principals — according to Chad Heck of the Indiana Library Federation, which advocates for libraries in the state.

Students want new books. Thanks to restrictions, librarians can’t buy them.

And in Idaho, the mere introduction of legislation had an immediate effect, said Lance McGrath, president of the Idaho Library Association. A day after Crane put forth an early version of his bill, the Idaho Association of School Administrators circulated a list of 25 titles lawmakers proposing library-related bills were most likely to find objectionable, including “This Book is Gay” and “Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out.” The Kuna School District quickly designated all these as “behind the shelf” books, meaning that if a school possessed them, students must obtain a signed permission slip from their parents to read them, according to Allison Westfall, a spokeswoman for the district.

“Kuna was walking a fine line between providing access and providing that level of control being sought through the legislation,” McGrath said, speculating that the district withdrew the books in hopes of avoiding controversy and negative attention.

All 50 states maintain obscenity laws, which typically prohibit the distribution of obscene material to minors and impose heavy fines and prison sentences for violations. But the vast majority adopted exemptions for schools, public libraries and museums in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to ensure educators could provide full information to children on topics such as biology, health and s*x education without facing expensive litigation, according to a research report from the advocacy group EveryLibrary.

Back then, lawmakers took it for granted that schools and libraries were not trying to disseminate “criminally harmful material,” said John Chrastka, executive director of EveryLibrary, which is tracking library obscenity laws.

But that assumption of good intent no longer exists, he said.

“We are, as a country, at a very broken place right now,” he said. “We have a fundamental break in trust between some groups of society and the educational system.”

At the time the exemptions were enacted, legislators probably could not have imagined a book like “Gender Queer” — a memoir about being nonbinary that features oral s*x, ma********on and a scene in which an apparently teenager is about to engage in fe****io with an older bearded man — Heck of the Indiana Library Federation said.

“Gender Queer” is a favorite target of conservative politicians and parents who charge that it is inappropriate for children. It was the most challenged book in 2021 and 2022, according to the American Library Association. During a February hearing arguing for his Senate version of a library obscenity law, Indiana state Sen. Jim Tomes (R) cited “Gender Queer” as an illustration of the problem. The text is “something you’d see in an adult bookstore,” said Tomes, who did not respond to a request for comment.

“I just want these away from our kids,” he said. “We’re trying to prevent students from being exposed to books that are absolutely raw pornography.”

Heck, though, said he thinks there is a reason to keep books with s*xual content available to children, especially older students.

“Teens are s*xual, s*xuality is part of their life, and I think it is important that we represent their authentic experience in our collections,” he said. “Sex is part of that, and to censor that message isn’t exposing them to their own reality.”

A mom wrongly said the book showed pe******ia. School libraries banned it.

Some of the library obscenity laws may be vulnerable to legal challenge, said David Hudson, a Belmont University assistant professor who studies constitutional law. The most effective attacks will contend that the laws violate the First Amendment, because they are so broadly worded as to chill free speech, he said.

“What you always worry with ‘obscenity’ and ‘harmful to minors’ type laws is the vague language,” Hudson said. He pointed to “the alarming degree of subjectivity with regard to whether something … is really patently offensive.”

In February, the Missouri ACLU filed suit to overturn the state’s 2022 law establishing that school staffers can be fined up to $2,000 or imprisoned for a year for providing “explicit s*xual material” to students. The lawsuit, brought on behalf of the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association, alleges an over-broad violation of First Amendment rights. Coulter of the Arkansas Central Library System said his organization plans to file a federal lawsuit challenging his state’s law within the month — partly relying on a First Amendment argument.

“There are fundamental defects with these statutes,” Coulter said. “They’re a stick, a club that can be used to threaten librarians.”