Residents voted Tuesday to block the renewal of funds tied to property taxes, Bridge Michigan reported. The vote leaves the library with funds until the first quarter of next year. Once a reserve fund is depleted, it will be forced to close, Larry Walton, chairman of the library board, told Bridge Michigan – hurting not only readers but the community at large. Beyond the books, residents visit the library for its wifi, he said, and it houses the very room where the voting took place. “Our libraries are places to read, places to gather, places to socialize, places to study, places to learn. I mean it’s the heart of any community,” Deborah Mikula, executive director of the Michigan Library Association, told the Guardian. “So how can you miss this?” “We champion access,” he added, including material that may appeal to some in the community and not to others. “We want to make sure that libraries protect the right to read.” The Jamestown controversy began with a complaint about a non-binary author’s memoir, but soon escalated into a campaign against the Patmos Library itself. After a parent complained about Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: a Memoir, a graphic novel about the author’s experience coming out as non-binary, dozens showed up at library board meetings, demanding the institution drop the book. (The book, which includes depictions of sex, was in the adult section of the library.) Complaints began targeting other books with LGBTQ+ themes. A library director resigned, telling Bridge she had been harassed and accused of indoctrinating children. Her successor also left the job. Although the library put Kobabe’s book behind the counter rather than on the shelves, the volumes remained available. “We, the board, are not going to ban the books,” Walton told The Associated Press on Thursday. The library’s refusal to accede to the demands led to a campaign calling on residents to vote against renewing funding for the library. A group calling itself the Jamestown Conservatives handed out flyers condemning a library director who “promoted LGBTQ ideology” and called for the library to become “a safe and neutral place for our children.” On Facebook, the group says it exists to “keep our children safe and protect their purity, and to keep the nuclear family intact as God designed it.” Residents ultimately voted 62 percent to 37 percent against a measure that would have raised property taxes by about $24 to fund the library, even as they approved similar measures to fund fire and road projects. The library was one of the few in the state to experience such a loss, Mikula said: “Most have had a great response, sometimes as high as 80 percent. The vote comes as libraries across the US face a wave of calls to ban the books. The American Library Association identified 729 challenges to “library, school and university materials and services” last year, which resulted in about 1,600 challenges or removals of individual books. That was up from 273 books the previous year and represents “the largest number of attempts to ban books since we began compiling these lists 20 years ago,” ALA President Patricia Wong said in a news release. Not sure what fueled the culture wars we’re seeing, but libraries are at the front Deborah Mikula “We’re seeing what appears to be a campaign to remove books, particularly books that deal with LGBTQIA issues and books that deal with racism,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, head of the ALA’s intellectual freedom office, told the Guardian last year. Famous books by Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel and Ibram X Kendi are among those facing bans. “I’m not sure what’s fueled the culture wars we’re seeing, but libraries are definitely at the forefront,” Mikula said. Indeed, as states across the US move to deny LGBTQ+ rights, ALA’s #1 “most challenged” book last year was Gender Queer. “When you take those books off the shelf or challenge them publicly in a community, what you’re saying to every young person who identified with that narrative is, ‘We don’t want your story here,’” Kobabe said. the New York Times in May. Each library selects its own collection, Mikula noted, an intensive process that involves keeping up with what’s new, listening to what’s being requested and “weeding out” the selections that are rarely borrowed. “Our librarians are qualified. They have advanced degrees,” he said. “We want to make sure that the people who are hired to do this work are trustworthy and reliable and that they ensure that the full community is represented in their library. And that means having LGBTQ books.” If members of the community object to the inclusion of certain books, there are formal means to request their removal, involving a review committee and establishing that the person making the objection has actually read the book in question. But recently, he said, people “go to board meetings, whether it’s a library board meeting or a school board meeting, and they say, ‘Here’s a list of 300 books. We want them all removed from your library.’ And this is not the right channel, but they are loud and their voices hold.”
