Madfloridian's Journal - Grandmother would go to jail over book with sex info...city won't jail her

and make her a martyr for the cause. The library has received many copies since people began reading about the issue...and the court and library decided to let it go.

City closes the book on Karkos case

LEWISTON - The showdown between the city and JoAn Karkos ended Friday even though Karkos failed to return a library book she has deemed obscene.

Karkos will not be ordered to jail for violating a judge's orders. The city will not continue trying to wrest from her a copy of "It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health."

There will be no national debate drawn to Lewiston based on the arrest of a 64-year-old grandmother. City leaders believe they made the right choice by choosing to drop the matter. Karkos, they say, still has to pay a $100 fine and cannot return to the library until she does so.

"Going any further on this, really, I don't see any other gain that the city is going to have," Lewiston City Administrator Jim Bennett said. Karkos said she would have been happy to see it go further. By dismissing the matter, she said, the city is trying to make the issue go away.

JoAn Karkos is not happy about that really, she wanted to make her point.

A judge has ordered JoAn Karkos of Lewiston, Maine to return two copies of It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, which she checked out the Lewiston and Auburn public libraries last year.
Boing Boing blog

From Right Wing Watch

A local woman said Wednesday she's prepared to go to jail rather than return a library book about sexuality that she calls "dangerous" to children.

JoAn Karkos, 64, was confined to a courtroom at 8th District Court for about an hour after she was ordered by a judge to hand over the borrowed book: "It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health."

ABC has an article and video about JoAn Karkos.

The Book Titled 'It's Perfectly Normal' Is Frequently Protested

Officials in Lewiston, Maine, have told JoAn Karkos that she could face jail time if she does not, by this afternoon, return the library book "It's Perfectly Normal."

Karkos has had the book checked out of the Lewiston Public Library for more than a year in hopes of preventing children from reading it. Aimed at 9- to 12-year-olds, the book discusses puberty, sexual health and the emotions surrounding a child's newfound sexual awareness.

Her protest is not the first of its kind. From Texas to Colorado, people concerned about the book's frank images and language have staged protests to get it pulled off shelves at libraries and schools.

Probably good they just let it drop. If they had sent her to jail she would have become a hero to the right wing extremists who are terrified that kids in America might learn about sex.

I have not seen the book, but before I retired from teaching this kind of thing was happening on a daily basis.

Such a low level of tolerance now for anything that does not fit the narrow bigotry of the religious extremists.

I really sounded off to a Republican friend today that I was furious that the John McCain of 2008 had chosen a person with far right religious views, that he did it to inflame the intolerant rhetoric of wedge issues and division.

The person did not disagree, and did not get angry as once would have been the case.