When the Culture Wars Come for the Public Library

I have always loved to read and loved libraries.  Indeed, it was at a public library that I first found books that involved same sex love and realized my feelings were not unique to me.  Moreover, libraries allowed me to read and learn about an array of subjects and other peoples and parts of the world.   With books one could travel the world and learn about "non-mainstream" topics and people and truly open one's mind.  Nowadays, libraries are under attack because Republicans, pushed by Christofascists to whom the GOP is beholden want to censor and ban books that run counter to the fear and hate based Christofascist dogma.  It's akin to what the early Catholic Church did to eliminate anything  - and anyone - that challenged Curch teaching, helping to bring on the Dark Ages and an immeasurable amount of lost knowledge. The losers under this GOP onslaught are minorities, both racial and sexual, who these book banners want to erase from existence and those who are open minded and seek to learn more about others and who seek knowledge in general.  A long piece in The New Yorker looks at one small library system that is but one example of how the right seeks to limit knowledge.  Here are highlights:

Every public library is an exception. The world outside is costly and cordoned off, but here no one is charged, and no one is turned away. People browse for books and go online. They learn English, meet with friends, dawdle, nap, and play. For children, the public library is a place to build an inner life, unencumbered by grownups. Story time is an invitation to that experience. A librarian reads a book aloud to a huddle of kids seated cross-legged on the floor. It’s part early-literacy tool, part theatre, and looks basically the same wherever it happens. The public libraries in Flathead County, Montana, a region of mountainous beauty bordering Canada and Glacier National Park, offer seven story times per week, for babies on up. Three scattered branch locations—in Kalispell, Columbia Falls, and Bigfork—serve a population of a hundred and eleven thousand people, spread out over five thousand rugged square miles.

On a spring day in 2019, Ellie Newell, the youth-services librarian at the main branch, in a historic post office in downtown Kalispell, hosted a special story time for a visiting class of preschoolers. Newell was raised by librarians and had taken the job straight out of graduate school, drawn to Flathead’s reputation for “doing cutting-edge library stuff.” Several years earlier, the library had rebranded to adopt a new name and logo, as well as an updated, possibly foolhardy mission. The Flathead County Library System became the ImagineIF Libraries and set out to use technology and interactive programs to bring together far-flung residents of the county.

Like most children’s librarians, Newell did a lot of story times and kept a stack of read-aloud books on her desk. She considered it important to mix things up: some books with animals, some with people; some classics, some new releases. At the top of Newell’s pile that day was “Prince & Knight,” a fairy-tale picture book published in 2018. The story features a charismatic dragon, but no lady who wins a warrior’s heart. The romance instead unfolds between the titular prince (a man) and knight (also a man). Newell thought the book was sweet: a bit edgy in its gayness, but still chaste and traditional, culminating in marriage. . . . The children giggled and clapped. But, at the end of the reading, their teacher looked upset.

The class had come from a Catholic school, and, a few days later, the teacher wrote to the Daily Inter Lake, a local newspaper, saying how “shocked and grieved” she was by the presentation of a book about “homosexual marriage.” She argued that “such a controversial topic” should not be introduced to “innocent children.” Flathead County had always trended conservative, and harbored clusters of Ammon Bundy extremists, but its mainstream politics, until recently, tended toward a live-and-let-live libertarianism. The weeks that followed stunned library staff. Newell, who is openly bisexual, was harassed: “I had people get in my face, yell, and spit, and scream an inch from my face.” At an outreach event, she was grabbed by a man complaining of the “library’s agenda about transgenderism.”

The responses to the “Prince & Knight” reading tracked with the county’s divergent politics. Was the story time a sign of open-mindedness or proof that the library was promoting “all these alternative lifestyles,” as one Kalispell man wrote to the Inter Lake? The Catholic schoolteacher filed a formal challenge to “Prince & Knight,” seeking its removal from ImagineIF’s collection. The library director, Connie Behe, recommended that the book be retained because the work as a whole conformed to ImagineIF standards. The final decision was up to the library’s five-member board of trustees.

The board voted to keep the book in the collection, and subsequent meetings were quiet. It appeared that the tumult over Newell’s story time had settled. Then, two months later, a spot on the board opened up and Adams applied for the position.

When Adams applied, a supporter of ImagineIF went to Brodehl with an op-ed that Adams had written in the Inter Lake just after Donald Trump’s Inauguration. In the article, Adams instructed liberals to “toughen up and take it,” . . . . “I have to be ashamed of America in order not to offend an illegal alien. I have to let perverts use the restroom with my wife.” The library supporter hoped that Brodehl would be shocked by Adams’s polemic.

In fact, Brodehl’s fellow county commissioners, who belonged to the right wing of the Flathead Republican Party, had encouraged Adams to apply for the library board. The commissioners seemed to think that the library director and employees were too liberal, and that the library board too often bent to their will. Adams agreed. . . . He said repeatedly that, if it were up to him to create a library, it would “be a religious library.” The commissioners unanimously appointed him to the board.

For years, the Flathead County Library System operated with little controversy. It did what it could with a small budget, a team of three dozen full- and part-time employees, and the fund-raising help of a dedicated nonprofit. . . . At the new ImagineIF, furniture was removed to increase space for meetings and play. A book bike went out to the community, and youth-services librarians expanded their story times in parks and schools. There were no more fines for overdue materials.

The changes were popular, but not universally so. Some residents didn’t like that the county’s name had been erased. They saw ImagineIF as a space of haughty leftism, run by women with master’s degrees.

In retrospect, the skirmishing over ImagineIF contained the germ of today’s library wars. Public libraries—once as popular with libertarian autodidacts as leftists—have become targets of the Republican Party, and not just in Flathead County. Local-library systems, and local librarians, are being vilified nationwide as peddlers of Marxism and child pornography. Whatever faith there was in public learning and public space is fraying.

Last month, the Missouri House of Representatives tried to eliminate all funding for public libraries. A group of citizens in Ada County, Idaho, attempted to force a vote that would dissolve the local-library system. Tactics previously applied in public schools, ostensibly to protect children, are now being used against city- and county-library systems whose mandate is to help everyone.

Part of the issue in Flathead County was a disagreement over the term “everyone.” The commissioners and conservative trustees appeared to prioritize the majority. If the area was predominantly white, straight, and Christian, then books such as “Prince & Knight” surely had no place in the public library. The workers of ImagineIF saw things differently. . . . “The library has always been an organization that collects not just for majority populations but also minority populations,” said John Chrastka, of the national advocacy group EveryLibrary, which advised ImagineIF’s staff and trustees. S. R. Ranganathan, a founder of library science, made the same argument a century ago, in his statement of basic principles: “Every reader his book. Every book its reader.”

In 2018, Crowley grew tired of her dealings with the commissioners and retired early. Behe, the longtime assistant director, took over. She shared Crowley’s enthusiasm for making ImagineIF “an inspired, creative place,” but had a softer, conciliatory bearing that she hoped would mollify the commissioners. Not long into her term, though, came the controversy over “Prince & Knight.”

The county commissioners, however, were intent on jerking the library rightward. Their recruitment of Adams was only the first step in remaking the board. In the summer of 2020, they reappointed an incumbent trustee, Heidi Roedel, a Christian homeschooler and a G.O.P. activist. A year later, they replaced a moderate Republican who was twice named Trustee of the Year by the Montana Library Association with David Ingram, a retired anesthesiologist who regarded contemporary notions of race and gender identity as incompatible with his Christian world view.

Ingram, Roedel, and Adams secured a three-vote majority on the five-member library board. The conservatives were in control.

In July of 2021, just after Ingram’s appointment, Behe stepped down as director. A current employee of ImagineIF told me that the “sheer strain” had forced her out. Behe took a library job in Tacoma, Washington, and wrote, in her farewell note, “As public servants, the library director and staff don’t get to cherry-pick which interests, perspectives, and values are represented through library materials and programs, even when it violates their own values and perspectives, or those of Trustees.” Shortly thereafter, Newell, the youth-services librarian, left ImagineIF for a better-paid position in Bozeman, one of the wealthiest cities in Montana.

A woman named Carmen Cuthbertson . . . . inveighed against “Gender Queer” to a library worker named Ben Mason, who has long blond hair and identifies as nonbinary. To Mason, it felt personal. It was as if she had said, “Hi, I’d like to complain about your general identity,” they told me. “It was a big ‘fuck you.’ ” . . . . Cuthbertson is a Swiss immigrant and an active member of the county G.O.P. She filed a formal challenge to “Gender Queer,” arguing that it contributed to the “mainstreaming of fringe experiences and behavior” and reflected the “state of mind of a troubled individual.”

At a board retreat held soon after Cummins started, the trustees and librarians arrived with very different priorities. Ingram was upset that ImagineIF had the book version of the Times’ “1619 Project,” but no books that criticized that project. Adams wanted to rewrite the library’s policies to give the board more say—over book displays, for instance. (He denied that he was trying to exert control and said that it was routine for board members to review ImagineIF’s policies.) He also wanted to remove all references to the American Library Association, which prescribes standards for public libraries.

ImagineIF employees used the retreat to highlight their dismal working conditions. They presented a survey that found a “hostile environment for L.G.B.T.Q. and non-Christian staff and public.” They were being called pedophiles and groomers and, in recent weeks, had logged many instances of patrons hiding or vandalizing books that dealt with sex or BIPOC identity. The board members looked unconcerned.

The fights at ImagineIF also played out on much larger stages. In the Montana legislature, and ten other Republican-controlled statehouses, lawmakers introduced legislation that would criminalize the distribution of “obscene materials” to minors by public librarians, public-school employees, and museum workers—groups long exempted from obscenity statutes, given their interaction with a range of subjects and texts. Politicians from tiny, rural towns gave speeches on the dangers posed by the transgender lobby and comic books.