This week, a memo went out to librarians across Oklahoma County's Metropolitan Library System telling them that not only are they not allowed to assist anyone in looking up information on abortion..."
It sounds like this is one county in Oklahoma, not the whole state, as the headline implies. The legal department freaked out over the new law, overreacted a bit, then backtracked when the librarians threw a fit. (I'm reading between the lines, but I think that's what it means when the article says librarians "balked." Knowing what I know of librarians and how seriously they take their mission of providing information freely and being the guardians of the public's free access to it, I would have expected fits to be thrown over something like this.)
None of that makes this okay by any stretch of the imagination,
of course. I just don't like it when articles exaggerate as much as this one does. This definitely points up, though, just how much some of these state legislatures are overreaching when they make laws about providing information to people. Most librarians are dedicated to the principle of intellectual freedom and would fight something like this tooth and nail and they would have the backing or organizations like the American Library Association abd the ACLU.
As awful as the abortion bans being passed in red states are, I think these states are opening up a whole new and even more heinous can of worms when they start legislating things like the availability of information and the right to freely travel between states. These lawmakers are megalomaniacs. They aren't satisfied with forcing people in their states to give birth against their will. They won't be satisfied until they can control the reproductive choices of ALL women, everywhere in this country. They make me sick.
= new reply since forum marked as read