CHECK THE FACTS ON SARAH PALIN AND BANNED BOOKS

Claim: Books banned from the Wasilla, Alaska, public library by Mayor Sarah Palin.

Status: False.

More Left Wing Attacks - Dems do your homework please. Lies are so

FIRST: COMMENT FROM LIBRARIAN.NET
note: there’s some buzz being generated that says that this post contains a comment that lists the books that Palin supposedly wanted banned. The list is here, but there appears to be no truth to the claim made by the commenter, and no further documentation or support for this has turned up.


NEXT - SNOPES CHECKS THE ACTUAL FACTS -
Claim: List catalogs books banned from the Wasilla, Alaska, public library by Mayor Sarah Palin.
Status: False.

Origins: One of the many political rumors swirling around Alaska governor Sarah Palin after her selection as the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee had to do with the subject of books: That during her tenure as the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she had wanted to remove certain books from the city's public library, or had tried to have some books censored, or had banned a lengthy list of books (as reproduced above).
According to the Anchorage Daily News, around the time Sarah Palin first assumed the mayorship of Wasilla back in 1996, she initiated some speculative discussions with the city's librarian about the possibility of removing some "objectionable" books from the public library: In December 1996, [city librarian Mary Ellen] Emmons told her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman, that Palin three times asked her — starting before she was sworn in — about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose.
When the matter came up for the second time in October 1996, during a City Council meeting, Anne Kilkenny, a Wasilla housewife who often attends council meetings, was there.
Like many Alaskans, Kilkenny calls the governor by her first name.
"Sarah said to Mary Ellen, 'What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?" Kilkenny said.
"I was shocked. Mary Ellen sat up straight and said something along the line of, 'The books in the Wasilla Library collection were selected on the basis of national selection criteria for libraries of this size, and I would absolutely resist all efforts to ban books.'"
Palin didn't mention specific books at that meeting, Kilkenny said.
Palin herself, questioned at the time, called her inquiries rhetorical and simply part of a policy discussion with a department head "about understanding and following administration agendas," according to the Frontiersman article. According to that same article, no evidence has been uncovered that any books were actually censored or removed from Wasilla's library as a result of these discussions: Were any books censored [or] banned? June Pinell-Stephens, chairwoman of the Alaska Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee since 1984, checked her files and came up empty-handed.
Pinell-Stephens also had no record of any phone conversations with Emmons about the issue back then. Emmons was president of the Alaska Library Association at the time. Given that, as yet, there is no documentation of any books having been banished from the Wasilla library by Mayor Palin, or even of which books she may have had in mind when she broached the subject, whence comes the considerable register of tomes now being circulated as "the list of books Palin tried to have banned"? The purging of the selections enumerated here from a public library would surely outrage any educator or book lover, with the listing including classics of literature by authors from William Shakespeare to William Faulkner, works by popular contemporary writers such as Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, and even such seemingly bland reference works as Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.
One obvious clue that this list must have been cobbled together from some source other than discussions that may have taken place in Wasilla in 1996 is that several of its entries (most notably the books in J.K. Rowling's popular Harry Potter series, which began in 1997) hadn't yet been published back then. In fact, versions of this list have been circulating since at least as far back as 1998, and is actually a catch-all collection of titles said to be "books banned at one time or another in the United States."
Last updated: 8 September 2008
The URL for Snopes is http://www.snopes.com/politics/palin/bannedbooks.asp