CARLTON FLETCHER: Book-banning … A pathway to basic rights denied

“Stop children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.”

— Buffalo Springfield

Here’s what happens when we allow politicians to go unchecked, when we allow them to pass laws that are at a minimum, asinine, at worst, infringements on our basic freedoms.

The state of Georgia’s gerrymandered conservative majority has succeeded in taking away students’ rights to read books that they — or the purported “Christian” soccer moms vital to their base — find offensive. So far, these determined moms who “know what’s best for our children” have managed to have classic books like “Animal Farm,” To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Color Purple,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Catcher in the Rye” and many others banned, along with any book that has a black or LGBTQ character.

Controlling children’s reading habits, it seems, is not enough for these right-thinking gentlemen who are granted by their god the wisdom to know what books children should and should not read. There is a movement among the lunatic fringe in this group to ban funding for county and state library systems that allow such illicit material to be loaned out to the public, no matter the patrons’ age.

We in Georgia can only hope that we get unhinged hypocrites like Florida did to determine what we can and can’t read without becoming somehow subversive … you know, admitting that we actually like people of a different color or of a different sexual persuasion or religion. Certainly, we can’t have that happen.

The Florida-based Moms for Liberty organization made its name by declaring it would put an end to the nation’s public-school librarians and grade-school teachers promoting “sexual subversion” of small children. The organization had, it declared, the rightness of God on its side.

Hold that thought.

Bridget Ziegler, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty and a member of the Sarasota County, Fla., School Board, and her husband, Christian Ziegler, the chairman of Florida’s Republican Party, became the faces of the ban-the-books movement. Bridget Ziegler is even credited with helping inspire Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law forbidding teachers from mentioning the existence of homosexuality.

It turns out, though, that Christian was accused of raping the woman with whom he and Bridget had brought into their marriage bed. Sarasota police released an investigative report alleging that Christian Ziegler showed up at the alleged victim’s place seeking a more traditional two-way adulterous encounter, you know, the kind of thing people like the Zieglers say is OK … if you’re married … to each other.

According to the report, the third member of the Zieglers’ throuple turned Christian down, noting, “Sorry, I was mostly in (it) for her.” She says an angry Ziegler proceeded to rape her. Ziegler denies the charge.

Tough luck for the Zieglers: There’s a video of these righteous Republicans performing with their third.

In the wake of this sordid mess becoming public, Trump lover Bridget Ziegler admitted that a sexual encounter involving her, her husband and his accuser had occurred, but she said it only happened the one time. (I think it says in the Bible somewhere that real Christians like the Zieglers are given one mulligan when it comes to this type of behavior. And, certainly, the Mrs. getting involved intimately with another women does nothing to detract from her righteous battle to keep books by black people and those impure LGBTQ people off library shelves.)

There’s that old saying about people and glass houses …

We can only hope Georgia’s would-be Gestapo can recruit an upright family-values couple like the Zieglers to put in charge of our important book-banning program. And I’m sure we can forgive them a little indiscretion to reward them for their important work, just like Florida’s leaders did the Zieglers.

Look, the library is one of my favorite places to go. I love the feel — the potential for joy — of being in a building surrounded by the works of my heroes … Edgar Alan Poe, Michael Connelly, Stephen King, James Lee Burke, Lee Child, Don Winslow, John Grisham, Carl Hiaasen …

I damned sure don’t want some hypocrite telling me which of those masters’ books I can read.