By AlaskaWatchman.com

The annual Wearable Art Show in Ketchikan featured a book ban protest by several defiant local librarians.

The annual Wearable Art Show, hosted earlier this month by the Ketchikan Area Arts & Humanities Council, featured a book ban protest by several defiant local librarians.

The performance was praised by the Alaska Association (AASL) of School Librarians, which posted a video of the two-minute performance on its Facebook page.

“Congratulations to the Ketchikan AK Librarians who made a statement at the 2024 Wearable Art Show,” the AASL stated. “Advocating for the #FreedomToRead doesn’t just happen at school board and city council meetings.”

The politically-motivated performance opened with the unfurling of a large banner emblazoned with the words, “Nolite Te Bastardes Caborundorum,” a faux Latin phrase found in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.” An announcer interpreted the sign for the audience, yelling out, “Don’t be silent and don’t let them grind you down.”

Six women wearing long red gowns and Puritan head dresses, then stood silently on the catwalk. In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” nearly identical clothing is used to symbolize female fertility with handmaids being forced to wear red dresses and capes in public to indicate their primary role as assigned baby producers in a patriarchal futuristic society in which women try to gain individuality and sexual independence.

For the performance, the women put red tape over their mouths as they solemnly walked down the catwalk, defiantly threw back their gowns and revealed their varied undergarments, consisting of a gaudy corset, native regalia, a long night gown, a “freedom” dress and knee-high leather boots. Their costumes included signs emblazed with statements such as, “Read” and “Bans Off.”

Like many school and public libraries throughout Alaska and across the nation, the Ketchikan Public Library has been mired in heated controversies over the past couple of years due to local librarians’ insistence on hosting drag queen performances for children and placing highly sexualized books in its youth section, all in the name of “intellectual freedom.”

This past July the Ketchikan City Council rebuffed the city’s head librarian by voting to relocate a graphic teen sex book out of the youth section and into the adult area. The book, “Let’s Talk About It,” was deemed “pervasively vulgar” and “educationally unsuitable for minors,” due to the fact that the book encourages kids to explore sexual fantasies online and pay for internet porn, while including explicit images and references to various sexual acts.

Most local librarians and their leftist supporters were outraged by the city council’s actions, and have been exploring possible ways around the decision, as indicated in the minutes of recent Library Advisory Board meetings.

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Activist Ketchikan librarians don ‘Handmaids’ costumes in defiance of book challenges

Joel Davidson
Joel is Editor-in-Chief of the Alaska Watchman. Joel is an award winning journalist and has been reporting for over 24 years, He is a proud father of 8 children, and lives in Palmer, Alaska.


31 Comments

  • Tamra Nygaard says:

    Sounds like these librarians are obnoxious children. Nobody is banning books. Nobody is proposing to do so. What is happening is protecting children from pornography, and by promoting porn to kids, they are breaking the law. If these librarians had even a scintilla of knowledge and integrity, they would realize how idiotic they are becoming. Who hired these twits? I should think demanding porn for kids would constitute a firing offense.

    • Joel says:

      I wholeheartedly agree that’s why I’m all for getting rid of this porn and going further in limiting the access of bibles to kids under the age of 18. Simply too violent and too many scenes of incest, rape and murder for any young person to handle. In fact is should be illegal for kids to attend church till they’re of legal age to consent.

      • Tamra Nygaard says:

        Kids learn about the Bible from their parents, and from Sunday School or CCD. They certainly wouldn’t be asked to read it by any of the flaming liberal teachers in Alaska school districts. Nice strawman, but you probably should carry a fire extinguisher for when it goes up in smoke.

    • Neil DeWitt says:

      AMEN!

  • DaveMaxwell says:

    Demonic

  • Lucinda says:

    Oh the horror!

  • fedupwithleftistBS says:

    They should be fired.

  • Friend of Humanity says:

    There is a lot of symbolism going on in that photo. Children are easily influenced and their subconscious minds are soaking up all of that symbolism. Besides the costumes and the hand symbols, what else can we see? I hope that someone from Ketchikan will write about this event and share what they saw in person. The evil is on an all-out attack on everything lately – our Heavenly Father, our children, our gas and oil, our food, our skies, our real president, our local laws, and more to come. Everyone will needs to have their heads on swivels because the evil is coming from all angles.

  • Freedom Fighter says:

    Dump the American Library Association. It’s like a cult. The longer the nuts are attached to that psychotic regime, the more of this lunacy we will see infested in the libraries. These whackos are not intellectually superior. Their brains have been decayed by the rot of the ALA and its propaganda machine telling them the first amendment gives them protection to break the law and harm our children. We need to purge this from our libraries.

  • Friend of Humanity says:

    Very good show about mind control and programming. What we are seeing in our libraries and schools falls right in line with mind control and programming!
    ‘2/7/2024 The Dr. Ardis Show: Dr. Bryan Ardis ft. Mel K. & Cathy O’Brien (Replay)’
    https://www.brighteon.com/6f913152-d44c-46a1-96db-c76a10c54805

  • Angelica says:

    Nobody is giving pornography to children. If you don’t want your children to learn about sexual education from library books, don’t check them out. Nobody has a right to impose their values on the entire community. These librarians are freedom fighters!

    • Friend of Humanity says:

      Okay Lucy.

    • Jeriah says:

      Claiming nobody has a right to impose their values in the law is a claim imposing your sexual values on the entire community in the law, so get out of this conversation and go home. You can come back when you know the religious moral beliefs behind the duties you seek to put into our law.

    • Tamra Nygaard says:

      Oh, Angelica, that’s so cute. You think that kids, looking at porn in the kids’ section of the library, are not being given porn? Try again, but this time use your brain.

    • Jeryna says:

      Just who is it that imposing their values ??? Give me a break. You are in the proven minority. What happened to live and let live? I have worked with LGBTQ members even 20 years ago and we were friends and co-workers – they did NOT think they were more important than any one other group and as ‘in the olden days’ – did not shove their private lives in people’s faces ! We actually respected each other’s boundaries !! You do not get to decide what is good for my children. Sex education is one subject – explicit sexual activity and pornography is not your right to decide for me !

  • DaveMaxwell says:

    Dunceleavy is in the front row with his pants down!

    • Tamra Nygaard says:

      Probably want to cut back on the calumny. As I recall, that’s a sin.

      • DaveMaxwell says:

        Judgement of my comments? Isn’t it funny you have ignored the fact that dunleavy could defund this perversion! I’m not instigating the evils ripping our society apart! Our leaders are in fact supporting it, either passively or aggressively! I will not stand by and comply in silence, like the church does!

  • Sally Duncan says:

    athey should have been arrested already for prompting porn to children, but at the least they should ALL be fired.

  • Coliseum in the Snow says:

    Do these pictures mean the librarians are catching on? That they’re waking up to the fact that they belong to an insidious, soul-crushing, humanity-demeaning cult? This could be the beginning of a great awakening…

  • Mary H Rapp says:

    This is a very sad situation, and our children are once again, victims. I always have had the highest respect for our librarians, and have also been a financial supporter of our local library, but at present their actions have lost both my respect and support. Everybody knows that this porn being pushed as freedom of speech is just a farce. Some children have strong parental homes who keep an eye on what books they read, but so many children do not have this help and are left at the mercy of their teachers and librarians. These people are public servants and paid by us the taxpayers. I plan to write to our governor and those lawmakers in my district. If I see no attemps on their part to stop this evil, I will not vote for them again. It’s really quite simple. I will not take excuses either. I know most people don’t like what’s going on, and if they just follow these easy steps, I guarantee that we would get rid of these type porn problem. We can complain all day long, but unless we get rid of useless leadership, our problems will continue.

  • A caring teacher says:

    Valuable superintendents of public schools should simply defund the librarians. Anchorage and Fairbanks could both use some cleaning up in that department. Simply cut every librarian on the “books”. But this would require a quality superintendent. Sadly those are few and far between.

  • Mongo says:

    Probably wear that all the time at their Satanic Coven meetings.

  • Elizabeth Henry says:

    How foolish. They have bought into the false narrative of book banning promoted by gender dysphoric agenda. No one is banning books. Cataloging of books by many categories, including age appropriateness, has gone on since books were cataloged. A couple questions come to mind though, why are these people so intent on making disturbing material available to children as young as possible? Why is it such a bad thing to catalog it where kids cannot access it without parental consent? None of this is book banning. That term is a lie.

  • Penny Johnson says:

    Systemic institutionalization and sexualized grooming of children. what these people are doing is predatory: Get between the parents and their minor off spring – Marxist doctrine, and Queer Theory. There are no bans here, just appropriate parenting.

  • Chatam says:

    How boring….

  • John J Otness says:

    PERVERTS GOTTA PERVERT!!!!

  • Eleanor Currit says:

    Librarians are a bunch of liberal psychos? I’m shocked, absolutely shocked.

  • Friend of Humanity says:

    Good conversation on SGT Report about cultural Marxism, wolves in sheep’s clothing and the fall of the Republic which very much mirrors the fall of Rome. Included in this conversation is what is happening to our children.
    https://rumble.com/v4da6a9-the-good-shepherd-john-paul-rice.html

  • Homeschoolers Told You says:

    These perverts and pedos are sick and wierd. Stay away from my family you sickos…Leftist White Women are the single most destructive demographic today.

  • Homeschoolers Told You says:

    Every single person who supports these pedophiles must be assumed to be just as sick and a danger to our children. All of your arguments are putrid…you are all pervs who should be austrasized along with the Library Association from a sane community . you are all criminally insane.
    This goes for:
    Joel
    Angelica
    Perhaps the police should investigate you for what you are doing to kids?