Sarah Palin, Anne Kilkenny and the Authority to Ban Books

At one time, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. While she was mayor of that small town, Mayor Palin found herself at odds with people over various aspects of her job, which is the normal run of events with regard to politics. It happens. Not everybody will always be in agreement on a given topic. That is individualism and that is as it should be.

But Sarah Palin has a problem with wielding authority it would seem. The first red flag that went up when Senator John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate was that she was under investigation by her own state legislature for an alleged abuse of power. Dubbed "Troopergate," this state-turned-national issue brought to light an alleged abuse of authority by the governor's office in the dismissal of the state Safety Commissioner because he had refused to fire Palin's sister's ex-husband, who was a state trooper at the time.

And then there was the citizen's letter from Wasilla resident Anne Kilkenny that has been circulating on the internet. Time magazine and the New York Times have gone on record that the allegations in the letter have been corroborated.

Anne Kilkenny grew up with Sarah Palin. She knows the family. She also has a problem with Sarah Palin's new mythologized status as the potential vice president of the United States. The letter is an attempt to rectify that.

The many odious items concerning Sarah Palin as a politician enumerated by Anne Kilkenny this writer will let pass for the time being in order to address the one issue most important to a writer and to a free society: the freedom of expression, the First Amendment. In her letter, Kilkenny states:

"While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter."

The banning of books rings ominous to anyone that understands what lies at the heart of the banning. Authority over expression. What is objectionable to one may not be objectionable to others. The opposite is also true. But to use one's authority to dictate what others read is an abuse of the First Amendment and the freedom of those others to express themselves through their self-exposure to certain forms of media. Under the guidance of the Supreme Court, decency standards are to be determined by locality, due to the extension of the abovementioned truth -- one locality's standards may differ from another locality's standards. A "to each his own" way of dealing with local mores and standards.

Simply put, if Mayor Sarah Palin had wanted objectionable materials to be taken from the library, she should have went through the legal process of proposing, writing, and passing legal standards upon which those materials would be judged. With a public mandate. By voting the standards into being.

Not employing censorship.

Not through personal tyranny.

An individual who would take it upon themselves to be sole arbiter of what a society -- in this case, the town of Wasilla -- reads, peruses, or studies is a person who is an oppressor of ideas and free thought. Without the cooperation and the support of public mandate, this sole proprietorship of governance is generally referred to as dictatorial. It is authoritarian and it suppresses.

It is as undemocratic and as un-American (read: unconstitutional) a method of governance as can exist. U. S. historian Gertrude Himmelfarb said, "As liberty of thought is absolute, so is liberty of speech, which is "inseparable" from the liberty of thought. Liberty of speech, moreover, is essential not only for its own sake but for the sake of truth, which requires absolute liberty for the utterance of unpopular and even demonstrably false opinions."

No one should have the sole discretionary power to deny the dissemination of ideas.

Mayor Sarah Palin has a problem with authority. She wields it with an absolutism that involves the exclusion of ideas. And she wields it against individuals who would attempt to thwart said authority.

This writer has but one more point to add, in language that is sure to be understood by Sarah Palin and all those like her over the years that would have banned The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Catcher In The Rye and the Harry Potter books: "You can ban our books when you pry them from our cold dead fingers."

Sarah Palin is 60 days away from being vice president of the United States.