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Book-Banning 'Moms For Liberty' Remind Me Of 'Harper Valley PTA' (And '1984')

Book-Banning 'Moms For Liberty' Remind Me Of 'Harper Valley PTA' (And '1984')

Here we go again. What we have here is a classic moral panic, a repeating theme in American public life.

Remember the McMartin preschool trial in Los Angeles back in the 1980s? Bizarre allegations of satanic sexual abuse were made against a family-run day care center in Manhattan Beach. Replete with sensational media coverage, the investigation and two criminal trials ended up lasting for seven years and costing almost $15 million — the longest criminal trial in U.S. history. A total of seven day care workers were charged with 321 counts of sexual abuse involving some four dozen children.

Prompted by true believers using anatomically correct dolls, little kids too young for kindergarten told fantastic tales involving flying witches, hot air balloons, dinosaurs and secret tunnels that children accessed by being flushed down the toilet before being abused by famous movie stars.

In the end, not a single episode of child molestation was ever proven, and there were no convictions, although some of those accused spent years in jail. All charges were eventually dropped. In the end, the mother whose accusations prompted the original probe was diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia and died of alcohol poisoning.

Lawrence Wright’s terrific book Remembering Satan tells a similarly horrific tale of “recovered memory syndrome” that convulsed Olympia, Washington, around the same time. Father-daughter incest, orgies, unholy rites and mass infanticide — under the right circumstances, it appears, suggestible individuals can be persuaded to confess to almost anything.

If all that sounds reminiscent of the QAnon cult belief that Hillary Clinton conducts murderous satanic rituals in the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant (that has no basement), then you must be paying attention. Exactly why Americans are so prone to these repeated episodes of collective hallucination is hard to say. But fundamentalist Christianity appears to be the common denominator.

Which brings us to "Moms for Liberty" and their impassioned crusade against, yes, public librarians. Exactly what these women think the word “liberty” means is not clear. They are censors and book-banners of great passion and determination. Rather like the Junior Anti-Sex League in George Orwell’s 1984.

In Arkansas, near Little Rock, the Saline County Republican Women have even erected billboards declaring war on “X-RATED LIBRARY BOOKS.” Judging from the examples cited on the related website, most are R-rated at best. They’re largely earnest tomes such as Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human. It is shelved in the “Young Adult” section of the library.

“The opinion/instruction in this book directly and continuously opposes Christianity and the Word of God,” readers are told. The group accuses the county library staff of pushing “the LGBTQ agenda” and sneers that they should instead serve “the people of Saline County, not the interests of people in California.”

California, which gave the nation Ronald Reagan, is now synonymous with Sodom and Gomorrah among the GOP elect.

How many young women in Saline County become pregnant during high school for lack of understanding of what used to be called “the facts of life,” I can’t tell you. But I can assure you they learn more about sex in pickup trucks than in the public library.

Seriously, how many libertine librarians have you known? A less subversive cohort would be hard to imagine.

Even granting that the institution known as “Drag Queen Story Hour” has got to be the dumbest example of liberal folly since “Defund the Police,” the notion that junior high librarians — of all people — have dedicated their careers to “grooming” children for sexual purposes ... well, it’s just too silly to talk about.

Besides, if you follow the news, it’s in the churches, not the libraries, where all the action is. Scarcely a week passes around here without some preacher being busted for sexual misconduct.

Well, coaches and English teachers, too.

During my own long-ago youth, the naughtiest book I read was Peyton Place, the scandalous 1950s bestseller that lifted the lid off a small New England town. I certainly didn’t borrow it from the library. Paperback copies were everywhere.

The novel portrayed sexuality as fascinating, yes — also intoxicating, ubiquitous and dangerous. Kind of scary, actually. If anything, the women were worse than the men. After the lights went down, hardly anybody in Peyton Place, it seemed, was who they pretended to be.

That’s why Jeannie C. Riley referenced the novel in her classic country song Harper Valley PTA: “This is just a little Peyton Place/And you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites.”

I can’t help but start humming the tune whenever the Moms for Liberty take the platform.

Anyway, I could tell you what I think these pious crusaders do when they get back home after reading aloud naughty passages from library books to audiences of fellow Holy Housewives. (Assuming they do go home, instead of checking in at the No-Tell Motel for a couple of hours.) But never mind. Imagine it yourselves. I’m sure you can.

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President.”

Reprinted with permission from Suntimes.

Senators Demand Investigation Of Sexual Abuse at Immigrant Shelters

Senators Demand Investigation Of Sexual Abuse at Immigrant Shelters

Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) called on Wednesday for a federal investigation into what they termed “the alleged widespread and long-term pattern of sexual abuse” in the facilities holding immigrant children.

In a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General’s Office, the senators said they were particularly concerned that allegations of sexual assault aren’t being properly investigated.

The issue received new attention last week when the House Judiciary Committee released HHS records detailing 4,556 allegations of sexual abuse by children in federally funded immigration facilities from October 2014 to July 2018.

Last summer, ProPublica reported that police nationwide had received hundreds of calls reporting possible sex crimes at shelters that serve immigrant children. An Arizona shelter worker was sentenced to 19 years in prison after being convicted of molesting seven boys over nearly a year.

In December, ProPublica followed up that reporting to show that while many children had reported sexual assaults, records show the police weren’t investigating, often closing the cases within days or even hours.

In one case, a 13-year-old Honduran boy said he told his counselor at Boystown outside Miami that two older teens had tackled him, dragged him into an empty bedroom and tried to take off his clothes. One of them, he said, pinned him facedown and grinded his penis against his butt.

But the shelter waited nearly a month to call the police, taped over surveillance video showing part of the assault and then, according to the police report, told officers “the incident was settled and no sexual crime” had occurred. The Miami-Dade police closed the case without ever interviewing the alleged victim.

The Archdiocese of Miami, which runs Boystown, said it had handled the case properly.

After ProPublica’s questions, the Miami-Dade police reopened the investigation and have not announced their findings.

A week after ProPublica’s story, the Arizona Mirror reported on three child abuse allegations that prompted the federal government to shut down a shelter outside Phoenix. As in the Florida case, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had closed the cases without interviewing the children involved.

“We find it intolerable and inexcusable that child care operators are not immediately investigating reports, contacting and fully assisting law enforcement, preserving evidence and demanding justice for these children,” Grassley and Feinstein wrote.

President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which led to the separation of thousands of children from their families at the border last year, has focused attention on the government’s network of more than 100 immigrant children’s facilities across the country. Months after Trump officially ended the policy in June, the system remains near capacity as new policies, including the arrest of undocumented relatives who come forward to claim the children as guardians, have prevented children from being released from the shelters.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement is currently holding about 11,500 children, and the average length of stay has grown from just over 30 days in 2016 to nearly 90 days at the end of last year.

Throughout the summer of 2018, Trump administration officials repeatedly asserted that ORR shelters were safe, even fun, places for kids. But those claims quickly began to crumble as abuse reports surfaced.

After ProPublica’s reporting on sex crimes and other issues in the shelters last summer, as well as stories of abuse by other media outlets, Grassley and Feinstein demanded an investigation. Since then, investigators for the HHS inspector general have visited dozens of facilities to look into child safety at the shelters and whether operators were doing background checks of employees.

The HHS records released last week show that 178 complaints of sexual abuse by shelter staff were reported to federal law enforcement authorities between 2014 and 2018.

A review of the 80 cases reported in 2015 and 2016 shows that 21 staff members were either terminated or resigned following the allegations. Two other cases involved kids who were removed from their foster homes. And in another two, staff members were terminated for other reasons.

However, the HHS documents also show that a significant portion of the allegations were never investigated by child welfare officials and most contained no information about whether they were reported to law enforcement.

The senators asked investigators to gather police reports on all HHS facilities for unaccompanied children, review the agency’s policies and response and make recommendations about “what can be done to stop these assaults.”

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Epstein, Starr, Acosta And Male Privilege In The Age Of Trump

Epstein, Starr, Acosta And Male Privilege In The Age Of Trump

In the Age of Trump, it often seems that powerful, entitled men have taken to imitating the behavior of the great man himself: forcing themselves upon reluctant women (and sometimes girls), relying upon their power and money to protect them from the consequences. So go ahead and grab them, boys, because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

Maybe you could even let them touch your Super Bowl trophy — assuming that illegal Asian immigrants working 15-hour shifts in West Palm Beach “massage” parlors would have any idea what it represented. Apart from “big, strong me,” compared to “little, insignificant you,” that is.

Not a subtle message, actually.

“It’s unbelievable but apparently true,” comments feminist author Amanda Marcotte. “America’s intensifying wealth inequality has created a class of hyper-rich men who act like cartoon villains.”

She’ll get no argument from me. Trump hardly invented such practices, although he surely embodies them.

See, if women threaten to tell, there’s always a Michael Cohen around to bribe them into silence. And if things go seriously wrong, a randy billionaire can avail himself of the services of an Alan Dershowitz or Kenneth Starr — the brilliant advocates revealed last week as the brains behind convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s secret sweetheart deal with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida.

Think about it: the eponymous puritan scold behind the Starr Report (largely written by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh), humiliating Bill Clinton for his sweaty sexual sins. Then in 2008, Starr helped to arrange what a federal judge called a “calculated plan by the prosecutor” to allow billionaire financier Epstein to serve a mere 13 months in a private Palm Beach jail he left daily to visit his office, while keeping the arrangement secret from the teenaged girls who’d been his victims. (Not notifying them was the illegal part.)

Miami-based U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, it’s reliably reported, “did not want bad publicity for Epstein, they did not want other perpetrators exposed and/or they did not want the victims to object.”

Acosta currently serves as President Trump’s secretary of labor.

Kenneth Starr, of course, subsequently went on to greater glory as president of Baylor University, where he distinguished himself by running on the football field in cheerleader garb before being removed in 2016 for helping cover up sexual assaults by football players.

Anyway, what a cast of characters: Kenneth Bleeping Starr, the perpetually indignant Alan Dershowitz, a Trump Cabinet secretary, and Epstein himself: a sleek, billionaire sex offender jetting about in his private airplane (which cynics dubbed the “Lolita Express”) with pals like Trump, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew.

I ask you: If we can’t have televised congressional hearings about a scam like that, what’s the point of paying taxes?

But enough raillery. Back to the Super Bowl trophy and its humiliated owner, Robert Kraft: business tycoon, philanthropist, owner of the New England Patriots and longtime Trump crony. His company donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration; he’s a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago, the very fattest of cats.

Humiliated, because until he asked his chauffeur to drive him from his $29.5 million Palm Beach mansion for a couple of furtive visits to the Orchids of Asia Day Spa, a strip mall “massage” joint in nearby Jupiter, Florida, Kraft was a well-respected (if not universally beloved) man.

Now, at age 77, he’s the punchline of a national joke. His seemingly inevitable election to the NFL Hall of Fame has been delayed indefinitely; he may never live to see it. I know: boo hoo-hoo.

The legal penalties are derisory for somebody of Kraft’s wealth. He and a couple of hundred other men (less prominent billionaires among them) are charged with misdemeanors. Fines of up to $1,000 and no jail time are the likely outcome — not much worse than a speeding ticket.

Indeed, the mystery is why a person of his means would frequent a sad-sack joint like Orchids of Asia. At $79 for an hour’s entertainment, if you’ve got the price of a modest lunch at a Palm Beach restaurant, they’ve got to let you do it — whatever it is you want these powerless victims of human trafficking to do.

And smile while they’re doing it.

Local cops have persuasively depicted the women as victims of a cynical, corrupt industry. “These girls are there all day long, into the evening. They can’t leave, and they’re performing sex acts,” a Vero Beach officer told The New Yorker. “Some of them may tell us they’re OK, but they’re not.”

Marcotte thinks it’s about the sadistic exercise of power. “At a certain point,” she writes, “it’s about being able to inflict cruelty.”

Absolutely. But it’s also about the many powerful men who are emotional cripples: incapable of experiencing the love of mature women they know first as the dearest of friends — the only form of sexual intimacy worth having.

IMAGE: Attorney Kenneth Starr speaks during arguments before the California Supreme Court in San Francisco, March 5, 2009. REUTERS/Paul Sakuma.

Betsy DeVos Seeking To Weaken Oversight That Exposed Sex Abuser Larry Nassar

Betsy DeVos Seeking To Weaken Oversight That Exposed Sex Abuser Larry Nassar

Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.com.

Title IX was the key to exposing Larry Nassar, the former Olympic gymnastics doctor and serial sexual abuser at Michigan State University, who was sentenced this week to 40 to 175 years, in part based on testimony from 156 of his young victims.

Lou Anna Simon, who served as president of the university, resigned after Nassar’s conviction. Reporting shows that the school mishandled complaints about Nassar’s abuse, which allowed him to prey on more young athletes, despite a federal investigation.

Under DeVos, the Department of Education is scaling back investigations at the Office of Civil Rights. It’s a dangerous step backward from the Obama administration, which pushed for more oversight to protect young women like Nassar’s victims.

It was an investigation by the Office of Civil Rights that revealed Nassar and triggered his prosecution.

Under President Barack Obama, the Education Department instructed schools to use the “preponderance of evidence” — the lowest standard — in sexual violence cases. DeVos, however, has issued directives requiring schools to use “clear and convincing evidence” in such cases instead.

Advocates for victims of sexual violence say the new guidelines have created a “chilling effect” for survivors to come forward. They are suing DeVos in federal court over the new, oppressive rules. SurvJustice, one of the advocacy groups suing, says that under DeVos’ policy, it has seen “a decrease in the number of sexual violence survivors seeking its services,” and that schools are slower to respond to complaints — or ignoring them entirely.

Stacy Malone, executive director of the Victim Rights Law Center, noted at a related press event, “Their reports will not be taken seriously because survivors will be dismissed as women who had drunk regret sex as opposed to who they really are, victims of sexual violence.”

Title IX is the federal law governing discrimination in education.

It was a Title IX investigator who determined Nassar sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl during a medical appointment in his office at the school. That report validated the claims of other women who sued the school over their assaults.

Reporting on the case, the Lansing State Journal disclosed the contents of the Title IX report of the girl’s assault, which noted that “Nassar sexually assaulted her, including digital vaginal and anal penetration, massaging in the genital area and massaging her breast.”

Michigan State came under scrutiny in 2010 after a female student alleged that two basketball players raped her. She complained that the school mishandled her allegation and filed a federal complaint about Michigan State in 2011.

In 2014, another student alleged that the school mishandled a sexual assault allegation and filed a federal complaint. That triggered a formal investigation by the Office of Civil Rights.

The office determined the school had fostered a “sexually hostile environment” and was forced to go under federal oversight.

It has now emerged that Michigan State did not fully comply with the federal government, which requested documents that would have included information about Nassar’s abuses.

Despite this, DeVos is moving schools away from further accountability.

Sexual predators like Nassar unfortunately have a powerful ally in the Trump administration. During her confirmation hearing, DeVos refused to commit to upholding the standards set in place by Obama.

“Would you uphold the 2011 Title IX guidance as it relates to sexual assault on campus?” Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) asked her. She said at the time it would be “premature” to make such a promise.

Once she was in office, she started to systematically undo those protections. She even met with so-called “men’s rights activists” who advocate for weakening or even eliminating those Title IX provisions and openly attack rape victims.

If DeVos has her way, victims of sexual predators will be further silenced, their pleas for help ignored, and the crimes of their tormentors swept under the rug.

Oliver Willis is a former research fellow at Media Matters for America who has been blogging about politics since 2001. Follow him on Twitter @owillis.

PHOTO: Betsy DeVos testifies before the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee confirmation hearing to be next Secretary of Education on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 17, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas