April 21, 2023:
After the sound defeat of language calling for felony charges against librarians and educators in SB 12 and SB 380 earlier in April, the Indiana legislature is once more considering criminalizing librarians and educators for the materials on their shelves.
Here's the Indiana Capital Chronicle on the situation:
Indiana lawmakers are mum about the revival of a much-debated ban on materials deemed “harmful to minors” in school and public libraries.
The legislators themselves don't know yet what bill the language will be slipped into, but we expect they'll hear it next week, possibly as early as Monday, April 24.
What To Do:
They're moving fast, so if you live in Indiana and feel strongly about libraries and censorship, please call your reps and senators NOW. Even if you already contacted them earlier this session!
Here's how to find and contact your legislators: https://iga.in.gov/legislative/find-legislators/
Here are some talking points and the general gist of our concerns:
Charging librarians and educators with felonies is not an appropriate response to the issue of challenging books.
It is a librarian or educator’s job to ensure that children have access to a range of well-reviewed quality books. They are trained and follow objective processes for material selection.
Libraries and schools already have processes in place for challenging books on their shelves, and these processes work.
And here's our own webpage where you can catch up on the situation and stay updated: https://www.lcplin.org/billupdates
If you don't live in Indiana:
Please do not contact the Indiana legislature about this! Instead, you can just hit that reblog button and help us reach as many people as possible.
Thank you, everyone, for your continued support of libraries and librarians!!
On February 2, 1886 the first Groundhog Day celebration was held in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. The next year the tradition was held at its current location of Gobbler’s Knob. So where did this curious tradition of observing whether or or not a rodent sees its shadow and using this to predict the weather for the coming weeks arise from?
German immigrants to Pennsylvania brought with them the tradition of observing a badger or hedgehog on the holiday of Candlemas, however since badgers are scarce in Pennsylvania and there are no hedgehogs in America. they substituted groundhogs. This stems from an earlier tradition of the lighting candles on that day for a blessing for the rest of winter, later this shifted to being used for weather prognostication.
The groundhog who does the predicting has been held by tradition to be the same groundhog since the very beginning, and is given the name “Punxsutawney Phil”. The celebration is very tongue-in-cheek, during Prohibition Phil was said to have threatened 60 more weeks of winter if the people of Punxsutawney were not allowed to consume alcohol.
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