how does a survey of a small town, an unscientific survey by a chicago newspaper and one from australia relate to librarians all over the country?

if i survey a group of gay men i will find that 100% of the group think that men are fun to have sex with. is this true for all of america?

see where i'm going with this?

and fang: man, come on. you're not 12. calm down, will you? you sound like you are pushing a shopping cart down a freeway and wearing a cape made of fiberglass insulation.

chuck,

good questions. first, i'm a guy working in his "spare" time on this. i do not have the time and resources to produce definitive results or to find them. i do what i can. the opposition to my educational efforts to help people see past the ala propaganda is a huge organization receiving huge funding from other huge organizations. i just don't compete, and expecting me to is not really fair.

which brings up your question. you asked, "how does a survey of a small town ... relate to librarians all over the country?" that presupposes once again that the huge behemoth, the ala, is paramount to any individual community whose library the ala controls or attempts to control. am i suppose to produce evidence about every single american library before you will think i might have a point and the ala might be too controlling? for that i'll rely on a 2000 report called dangerous access by david burt and his collection of other related material: http://www.filteringfacts.org/research/papers

back to your question, exactly what is the relevance of the oak lawn, il, survey and the ala's actions there to force its agenda into the community despite the lengths to which the community went to remove such influence have on the rest of the country? good question. answer? the ala is shown as having forcefully controlled public library policy and actions, and nothing the community could do could loosen the grip (although the community stopped short of legal action due to the costs -- an advantage the ala uses against local communities).

oak lawn serves as an example of the control the ala has over local communities and the lengths to which it will defend its control. oak lawn serves to prove that the ala claims that a local community control its own local libraries is false, at least some of the time and in respect of the issue the ala is pushing. this false claim of local control is used as the main argument against state filtering laws.

the ala argues state filtering laws take away a local library's ability to act locally for itself. yet at the same time the ala itself controls local libraries, and oak lawn serves as an example. do you know any other communities where the government, backed up by a survey, officially asked the library to reconsider making playboy available to children and the library refused and children still have access to the material this very day?

the ala gets to thwart the people seeking to filter libraries by claiming libraries must act locally, then the ala controls those very same libraries so that it is impossible to act locally. does this seem fair to you? does this seem fair to anyone? i know you can at least be fair because even though you agree with fang face, at least you told him to "calm down."

when the ala opposes state filtering laws by claiming such laws take away the ability for local libraries to act locally, can the ala be taken seriously when the oak lawn matter proves the ala itself controls at least one local library? is not the ala's opposition to filters really designed to protect the ala's very control over local public libraries? indeed, aren't state filtering laws proposed and needed precisely because local public libraries don't stand a chance against the ala?

and the oak lawn case proves this lack of local control. hence the significance of oak lawn to the entire country.