Did Sarah Palin Try To Ban Books? And Keep Bars Open?
Via Andrew Murphy of Libertarian Republican comes a link to a Time mag story on GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin's tenure as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. A snippet:
[Former Mayor John] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.
[Longtime resident Chas] St. George [a Stein supporter], however, points out that Palin couldn't have seen everything through an Evangelical lens. She did, he says, notably resist calls to restrict operating hours for the bars in town. And even if faith did play an unusually large role in her decision-making as mayor, it may have only reflected the continued rise of Evangelicalism in the valley, a growth that continues to this day.
Banning books while keeping the bars open? Not sure how much faith to put in any of this. Early reports of Palin pushing religion into the publicly funded square—that she was for teaching creationism in public school, for instance—seem to be erroneous. That's comforting, to say the least, though it doesn't necessarily mean she's all good, either.