Last month I wrote a post regrading a group of people in West Bend, WI who are trying to get books that they considers to be obscene moved from the section of the library designated “Young Adults.”
That fight caught the attention of Robert Braun, head of something he calls the Christian Civil Liberties Union, who then filed a lawsuit seeking $120,000 in damage for having been allegedly caused emotional distress by the book being in the library and the right to publicly burn the library’s copy of the book “Baby Be-Bop”
The entire bizarre battle was picked-up by CNN the other day and so Alan Colmes invited Braun onto his radio program to discuss his lawsuit.
It was, needless to say, highly entertaining.
Braun apparently doesn’t understand the difference between racism and censorship, because when Colmes accused him of engaging in the latter, Braun’s response was, and I quote:
Let me tell you who’s involved in this suit. One of the gentleman with me is Black, his wife is Indian, she’s a Comanche, the other one is … I have Jewish blood in me.
And it just went downhill from there, with Braun declaring that he’s going to burn a copy of “Baby Be-Bop” no matter what – not the library’s copy, because that would be illegal, but the copy which, for some reason, he apparently owns. Considering that he is suing the library for causing him emotional damage by simply having it in the stacks, it seems odd that Braun would have a copy of the very same book in his own house. Braun went on to admit that he doesn’t even live in West Bend and that his Christians Civil Liberties Union has a grand total of zero members.
At one point, Braun accused Colmes of not being a good Christian, which Colmes readily admitted (he’s Jewish,) and claimed that Colmes was now causing him emotional distress as well. When Colmes asked him to explain how anyone has been “damaged” by this book’s inclusion in the library, Barun responded that he and the other plantiffs “are elderly and it has damaged our moral views.”
Frankly, I think the entire thing can be summed up by simply noting that this interview might just contain a world record for the greatest number of mispronunciations of the word “library” in any seven minute interval:
