From CNN:
In September 2021, protesters ambushed the board meeting of the New Jersey school district where I have worked as a high school librarian since 2005. The protesters railed against “Gender Queer,” a memoir in graphic novel form by Maia Kobabe, and “Lawn Boy,” a coming-of-age novel by Jonathan Evison. They spewed selected sentences from the Evison book, while brandishing isolated images from Kobabe’s.
Next, they attacked Banned Books Week, an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. The protesters characterized it as a nefarious plot to lure kids to degradation.
But the real sucker punch came when one protester branded me a pedophile, pornographer and groomer of children. After a successful career, with retirement on the horizon, to be cast as a villain was heartbreaking.
Even worse was the response from my employer – crickets. The board sat in silence that night, and for the next five months refused to utter a word in my defense.
For months now, news broadcasts and social media have featured scenes of once-sedate board of education meetings now as action-packed as professional wrestling matches. Parents, faces red with wrath, scream in objection to library books. Often their outrage includes trash talk about librarians and board members.
These smackdowns aren’t isolated incidents. In a coordinated campaign, groups with extreme agendas have attacked libraries nationwide. Between January and August of this year, the American Library Association recorded 681 challenges against 1,651 books, setting a pace to shatter last year’s record 729 challenges.
For me, these aren’t just statistics, but the scorecard for the worst year of my working life.
. . . .
Amid the controversy, some colleagues shunned me. Students who were allied with the protesters hid books about gender and sexuality. Hate mail arrived at my school email address, while trolls attacked me on social media. The protesters even attempted to file criminal charges with local law enforcement.
The library that served as a safe space for students now felt unsafe for me. Yet I continued to plug away, teaching information literacy classes, creating programs, and consulting with students until October of last year, when I experienced what I now know was a stress-induced collapse. When I saw my personal physician the next day, she ordered my removal from the workplace, prescribed anxiety medication and referred me to a therapist.
The first few weeks of therapy were difficult. Despair consumed me to the point that when the therapist asked, “Have you had thoughts about killing yourself?” I tearfully admitted that I went to bed nightly wishing that I wouldn’t wake up.
The suffering was not mine alone. Under normal conditions, our library provides a calming oasis for students. Beyond books and research resources, we offer relaxing activities and a soothing atmosphere that satisfies students’ social and emotional needs. While I was under attack, however, the library program languished. No new books, no displays, no craft projects, no research instruction, no librarian for a friendly chat.
Counselors later reported that students expressed fear for my welfare.
Link to the rest at CNN
PG recalls an old, but now seemingly endangered, truism, “You can disagree without being disagreeable.”
He also remembers the many librarians who enriched his life as a boy and is pained to think of kind souls like them being insulted by anyone.
Think the librarians would allow graphic novels depicting heterosexual activity between boys and girls in elementary school?
Yes, if they claimed to be transgender.
Or if one is significantly older *cough*ageofconsent*cough* than the other
Well, I do agree with you, PG. But…
One of the problems here is that this librarian is, at least from the OP, completely unwilling to compromise. “These books will stay right where they are!” Disagreeable disagreement there, too.
Compromise is possible here, even in a school library. Simple proposition: establish a “restricted” list, one that is created from librarian, parent, and school board input – student access to which is only allowed to those with written parent permission.
But both sides have dug in their heels – everyone will have access (in the school), or nobody will have access (in the school).
Public libraries are a slightly different matter, although compromise for accessibility to minors is also needed there.
Book sellers should have no restrictions on content whatsoever. (I will happily get quite disagreeable about any attempts to censor there – other than for intellectual property considerations.)
I am so tired of the disingenuous discussion about this topic. I don’t think it’s controversial that a library for minors should not include explicit material. We can have an “agreeable discussion” about this when people stop framing the discussion as “parents want to censor/ban books!” rather than “parents don’t want their underage children exposed to explicit books.”
You may be correct, W., that my memories of kind librarians are from a different age than today’s librarians inhabit.
Obdurate librarians immersed in woke values are certainly in a different world than the librarians I recall as being a reflection of the literate members living in their communities. I will mention that I never had a sense of any librarian treating a poor patron any differently than a wealthy one.
Always have to remember that a broad brush is only good for painting a barn, PG.
It’s the loud ones, of whatever stripe, that you hear the most – while a majority (of whatever classification, whether it’s race, gender, politics, etc.) quietly go about their business in a professional manner.
I think the whole point is that this librarian, like many others, wants to go behind the parents back. My niece had issues with a high school counselor trying to push her into things that her parents didn’t want (she didn’t either).
Absolutism at work.
Why compromise when you can rally a mob to enforce you will?
Villagers with torches or online pearl clutchers, either will do.