In Front Royal, Va., a battle is brewing over books at the local public library that some say are objectionable, and the library could lose its funding over the issue.
“Seeing it jump into the public library from schools … was sort of staggering,” said Lisa Varga, executive director of the Virginia Library Association. Public libraries serve a broad function in society, she said — they assist job hunters and new English speakers, help grandparents digitize family photos, give kids a safe place to hang out on a summer day.
of the conservative Family Research Council, a woman’s 4-year-old grandson visited the library earlier this year and saw a sexually explicit book in the children’s section that the grandmother found appalling. In April, he filed formal complaints against three titles — “I Am Jazz,” a picture book about Jazz Jennings, a trans woman who writes she was “born with a girl’s brain in a boy’s body”; “This is Why They Hate Us,” a young adult novel about a bisexual Latino boy; and “Ana on the Edge,” about a figure skater coming to terms with gender identity.
“Our library should not be carrying ANY material about LGBT,” one form read. Another listed “homosexual content” as the reason for removal; “LGBT lifestyle,” said another; “abnormal sexuality treated like it’s normal”; and on and on.The organizers of Clean Up Samuels Library are not identified on the website. Egger disputed that the movement is any kind of formal group, but said it’s far bigger than many realize. “There’s literally thousands of people on our side,” he said.
Samuels Library is a private nonprofit, so the county supervisors have no say over the library trustees. But they do have power over its budget; She sees the anti-book crusade as a political tactic, noting that numerous local candidates for state office used the June supervisors meeting to hand out campaign literature. “This isn’t actually a thing about caring about children, it’s to rile up the base, and we’re being used as a pawn,” Patton said. “This has divided our community. It’s hate. It’s toxic.”
In 2022, the General Assembly took up Senate Bill 656, requiring the state to develop model policies for local school systems to notify parents of any sexually explicit materials used in classrooms and creating a mechanism for their child to opt out. Two Democratic senators from conservative districts joined all Republicans in the Senate to pass the bill, which cleared the Republican-controlled House on a party-line vote and was signed into law by Youngkin.
“Maybe if her book was called ‘The Little Transgender Fairy on the Prairie,’ they would have kept her name on the award,” he said, to laughter and angry shouts that were equally thunderous. Ross, the library director, had prepared a plan to implement two new kinds of library cards — one for young children that allowed them to check out only juvenile books, the other for children up to age 16 that allowed them to check out only young adult books. The cards would not be required for those age groups, but parents could opt in.
“I think Samuels Library is a great library,” one of them, trustee Pete Walker, said before voting against the books. “But I’ll admit I have some concerns about how we’re handling this controversy. I believe it’s wrong to sexualize our children.”
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