Jun 16, 2009 02:24 PM
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New York, 1:33 AM
Wed Feb 10
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Blog wars aren't just for the prickly coastals anymore. No, people in the cheese-filled, clotted heart of this nation are turning to the internet to yell at their neighbors too. Like this crazy book-burning lady and her angry liberal enemy.
Ginny Maziarka is a rotund Wisconsin grandmother who got upset one day because she realized that the West Bend library has books in its young adult section that have fucking in them. Like blowjobs and other dirty stuff that we guess Ms. Maziarka just... stumbled upon by accident? Anyway, the one that really stuck in her craw was a book about a gay kid struggling to find acceptance that a group called the Christian Civil Liberties Union (hah!!) wants to burn. Literally, they want to actually burn it. Anyway, Maziarka then launched a campaign, using a Blogger blog as her pamphlet press and 95 theses door, to get sexy (and gay) books restricted at the liberry.
Her irksome quest became so irksome, in fact, that another local fired up a Blogger page called Sleepless in West Bend to rebut the lady's claims that sex in books is terrible for teens. (As if teens read these days!) So the two have been battling it out like two feral cats. Sleepless calls Ginny a hypocrite who steals content, Ginny says it's a free country so who cares. Ginny calls someone crazy, Sleepless rails that it's ad hominem and ridiculous, leaving comments on Ginny's blog to that effect, Ginny then responds, finally removing the post in cowardly retreat. Basically this happens over and over again, forever and forever until everyone is dead and all the libraries are on fire.
For the record we obviously side with the Sleepless blog, because Maziarka is a lunatic with a teen sex fetish, but we wish whoever's writing it would stay on message rather than obsessively reblogging crazy Ginny, like that pathological Julia Allison re-blog wackadoo. The internet rarely makes anyone look good, especially when it's used just to lob random insults at people and then run away, back into the real world (trust us, sometimes we are bad and lazy and do this and it does no one any good), so the anti-book-burning message would probably be better heeded if it wasn't all personal attacks (valid as they may be).
So congrats to West Bend, home of the fightin' Suns, for entering the internet barking age, because progress is progress. No one ever said progress had to be a good thing.
Send an email to Richard Lawson, the author of this post, at richardl@gawker.com.
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