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BOOKSTORE STORIES
v Kisses to Meskis…
Winner of last year’s Freedom to Read Foundation Roll of Honor Award, Joyce Meskis is not resting on her laurels. When the feds demanded she turn over patron information from a sale at her bookstore, The Tattered Cover, she refused and took the case all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court. Read more about it at: https://members.ala.org/nif/v52n4/bookseller-reveals.html
v Gives new meaning to the term “chicken hawk”…
Borders (which already has a borderline bad rep for censorship and union busting) is at it again. A musician and fitness instructor is banned for calling Bush the Lesser less than buff. See: http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2003/072003/07242003/1049577
v Don’t want to frighten the suspects…
The Justice Dept. refuses to tell bookstores and libraries how often it has employed the provisions of the PATRIOT Act to investigate the patrons of bookstores and libraries. Go to: www.freeexpression.org/newswire/0819_2002.htm
v Shame on US…
And on a historical note, I came across this the other day in the September 2003 Atlantic Monthly’s “Word Court” column (about whether one can experience “second-hand mortification,” i.e., humiliation or embarrassment on behalf of someone else):
“I imagine,” writes Barbara Wallraff, “that when Thomas Jefferson ordered a copy of a French book titled Sur la Création du Monde, Un Système d’Organisation Primitive and a contretemps resulted, Jefferson felt ashamed on our country’s behalf. He wrote to his book dealer, in 1814, ‘I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America [this latter emphasis is Jefferson’s], a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate.’ If anyone can be said to have used mortified correctly in such a context, it’s Jefferson.”
Read the entire text of Jefferson’s letter at: http://search.eb.com/elections/pri/Q00067.html
And for a collection of Jefferson’s (and others’) frankly worded opinions on organized religion: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnosis284/message/5685
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