Michigan Library Fights to Restore Funding After Dispute Over Books With LGBT Themes

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From The Wall Street Journal:

A library in a rural western Michigan town is asking the community there to restore its public financing after voters defunded it following a dispute over books with LGBT content.

Voters in Jamestown Township, Mich., located about 20 miles southwest of Grand Rapids, defeated a funding measure for the Patmos Library earlier this month, stripping 85% of its funding for next year. The library, which has an annual budget of about $250,000, is in danger of closing if it can’t replace those funds, said Larry Walton, president of the library’s board.

The Patmos Library, like many libraries and schools across the U.S., has become a center of debate about free speech and what materials are appropriate for children. Conservative groups and parents in some states have asked libraries to remove books they find objectionable, many of which deal with LGBT themes.

County commissioners in Llano, Texas, ordered a review of children’s books at the local library system last year. Some residents sued the judge, county commissioners and library board members in April after some books were banned.

In Vinton, Iowa, residents criticized their library for having LGBT staff and books with LGBT-related themes. The library temporarily closed in July after staff members quit amid the harassment.

Patmos Library’s last two directors also resigned following harassment at work from people who objected to the books with LGBT themes, according to Mr. Walton. 

The American Library Association Executive Board said it was troubled by the increasing number of incidents of intimidation directed at library staff. 

The American Library Association condemns “threats of violence and other acts of intimidation increasingly taking place in America’s libraries, particularly those acts that aim to erase the stories and identities of gay, queer, transgender, Black, Indigenous, persons of color, those with disabilities and religious minorities,” the group said in a statement. 

The dispute over books in Jamestown began last November when a patron asked the library to remove the graphic novel “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” Mr. Walton said. Residents began asking for other books with LGBT themes to be pulled, including the graphic novels “Spinning” and “Kiss Number 8.” 

. . . .

Groups of parents unhappy with the materials began coming to the library board’s monthly meetings, demanding the removal of the books, Mr. Walton said. The library declined to remove any books from circulation. 

A group called Jamestown Conservatives that disagreed with the library’s decision to keep the books, organized a campaign to defund the library. The group passed out fliers stating the library has many books with LGBT content and “pornographic sexually graphic material,” according to a copy of the flier included in a packet for a library board meeting in June and viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The fliers also said the books were aimed at “very young and impressionable kids.”

. . . .

On Aug. 2, Jamestown voters struck down the funding measure for the library. The measure would have used property taxes to fund the library for 10 years.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal and thanks to T. for the tip.

In the United States, public libraries, especially those located in small towns, are right up there with Mom, apple pie and the American flag in terms of long-standing traditions of making books available to anyone in the community without charge.

This tradition was born and continues to be sustained by the local populace through a variety of public funding methods which, in PG’s experience, always include modest taxes paid by local citizens other than the most impoverished.

These libraries are managed by local librarians (who are often underpaid), but paid for by the populace through mechanisms created by democratically elected officials. Traditionally, virtually all local librarians paid close attention to local tastes in books and magazines because the people who had those tastes were contributing to the costs of acquiring and maintaining them.

While PG believes he has a bit more than a casual understanding of adults and children who are LGBT, he also has quite a lot of understanding of those who believe that children shouldn’t be exposed to such literature.

PG has also knows more than one friend who felt he/she, etc., would be described by one or more of those categories at one time in their lives, but who later came to regard themselves as falling into one of the traditional female/male categories and acted accordingly.

While he understands that reasonable people may disagree (and knows some who do), PG tends to come down on the side of local democracy having the ultimate say in what books should or should not be purchased with a portion of their tax money and placed in local public libraries located in communities where they live.

7 thoughts on “Michigan Library Fights to Restore Funding After Dispute Over Books With LGBT Themes”

  1. The Golden Rule of business:

    “Thems that bring the gold, rule.”

    Ignore it at your peril.

    Local libraries exist to promote literacy, especially among children. Not as a tool for… let’s say “social engineering”, to be polite.

  2. remember that this doesn’t mean the community doesn’t want a library, but they aren’t willing to fund a library run by people who decide that their decision on what’s appropriate for children trumps what the community thinks.

  3. I’m sure that someone is going to comment here with a First Amendment argument. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech …” Extended to all government agents, of course, by virtue of the Fourteenth.

    However, the only case I have ever seen that had a decision handed down in a Federal Court is this one: https://www.groom.com/resources/district-court-holds-that-a-public-library-plan-is-not-a-governmental-plan/

    Which decided that a public library is not a governmental agency. Which means that government, if so directed by their citizens, is not abridging the freedom of speech by denying funding with taxpayer dollars.

    (The link is a summary – irritatingly, the only text of the actual decision that I can locate is behind a paywall.)

    • I’m afraid that case is not on point, thanks to the Lawyers’ Full Employment Act of 1976, better known as ERISA. Skornick v. Principal Fin. Gp., 383 F.Supp.3d 176 (S.D.N.Y. 2019), turns on the peculiar definition of “government” in the ERISA statute… and some very specific applications of ERISA to those facts. That is, that the New York Public Library is not an agency, unit, or instrumentality of a subdivision of state government for purposes of determining claims regarding its retirement plans (which have special protection from attack via ERISA) doesn’t mean that for no other purpose is it a part of a “government.” Some of this, too, is due to the unusual structure of the NYPL so that it can accept donations without having to turn them over to the city’s common fund.

      But that’s a side issue.

      The key question is whether “collection establishment and curation” is purely for popular control, purely a matter of professional judgment beyond the ordinary competence of the electorate, or somewhere in between. Naturally, I think it’s somewhere in between, making it a hard question to answer — and, more to the point, one that doesn’t have a universally applicable answer.

      Here’s an example. Consider a library’s “law self-help guide” collection. There are some that are good; some that are bad; and that’s not the issue here. The real problem is self-help guides that are out of date and provide inaccurate information; say, the 1968 edition of Nimmer on Copyright. That particular edition might be an appropriate archival volume, deep in the basement archives of a major law research library — but it doesn’t belong at any public library, because it’s actively misleading and the patronage of a public library can’t tell that it’s being misled.† Similarly, a collection focused on the history of science might well include works by Lamarck and Lysenko — but, again, the patrons of a public library are unlikely to be able to discern much about their errors.

      Whether the particular books at this particular public library near Grand Rapids — which, by itself, makes me highly suspicious that there’s more than a hint of theocracy at work here (I can almost hear an echo of “hillllllllsdale,” which is almost the {pun-intended} definition of “bad faith argumentation”) — are so inappropriate that all funding must/should/could be cut off is a less-clear question. And none of us really know enough, because neither the particular books, nor the particular objections, nor the alternatives to meet the same needs that the professionals perceive for the collection, have been clearly stated. I tentatively come down on the librarians’ side here, but I’m willing to be convinced with specifics — albeit not with Sam-the-Eagle-like objections. Perhaps one of the books objected to advocated lady wrestlers…

      † I’d argue that substantial portions are actively misleading even as to copyright law in 1968, but that’s for another time — and directly implicates the “should selection be solely in the hands of professionals?” question in a rather different way.

      • I have family that live in that area, and believe me, it is VERY conservative. If they hired a librarian that wants to put “I wanna be a girl” books on the shelf, that’s not gonna fly very far.

      • The majority of these disputes, C.E., are not so much about what is in the library – but who they are made available to.

        I am quite certain that a library in, say, deep Blue Maryland would have the community howling for their heads – if they stocked Hustler magazine in the children’s section.

      • A hint of theocracy! Say it ain’t so. Citizens have the wrong values! To the barricades!

        And Hillsdale! God save us. They don’t even take government money. Makes the rascals hard to control.

        The best I have seen in this whole larger story comes from the parents at school board meetings reading from various books on the shelves of the school libraries. They were accused of reading obscenity by the school board and cut off from the speakers platform.

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