[A local resident made the statement below at the SPLD board meeting on March 25, 2024. The previous month the board adopted a new collection development policy.]
Good afternoon. I don’t want to be here today. I want to be outside playing with my kids, enjoying the sunshine.
So why am I here? Because this building, which is supposed to be a safe space for children, contains poison that will corrupt their minds and destroy their innocence.
I first brought this to your attention last summer and then several more times, expecting—or rather, hoping—that you would do something about it. I didn’t show pictures or read excerpts, partly from a sense of embarrassment and partly because I assumed you would get the idea without needing graphic details.
I was trying to appeal to you as mothers, grandmothers, aunts. I assumed you would be horrified, as I was, that this material is not only in the library but easily accessible to children and teens.
Yet not once did anyone on the board publicly express solidarity with my position, which I thought was a common-sense one. Not once did any member of the board reach out to learn more about what I’d found. Not once was this subject put on the agenda for discussion in a board meeting.
When you all began working on a new intake policy, I was hopeful that safeguards would be put in place to prevent explicit and dangerous material from being included in the children’s and young adult collections. Although the process took several months and the deliberations were done behind the scenes, I gave this board the benefit of the doubt.
What we got was the worst possible outcome. Not only were no safeguards put in place, the policy actually doubles down on the existing laissez-faire approach and even has a new section on so-called intellectual freedom, as if that’s what this is all about.
Talk of “intellectual freedom” and “parenting duties” is a smokescreen for what this is really about: an unwillingness on the part of this board to shield children from objectively harmful material by incorporating common-sense standards of decency, good taste and appropriateness in its collection development policy.
I am genuinely baffled by this. It’s as if I found razor blades throughout the library and asked the library to remove them. But I later found out that the library purchased the razor blades, and the people who are supposed to provide oversight to the library are totally unconcerned that a child may come across a razor blade and be harmed by it.
You may think I’m being dramatic, but that analogy is actually disturbingly close to the truth. There are books in the children’s and young adult sections of this library that promote gender ideology—the belief that gender is fluid, that people can change their gender, and that consequently anyone, including children, should be encouraged to go under the knife (literally) to make their body match their perception of their gender, if that’s what they want.
I deliberately did not submit a materials reconsideration form because I wanted to see if the board would take its responsibility to protect children seriously. With the new policy, the board has answered with a resounding No.
The question is, Why? I have been struggling to answer that question to my own satisfaction for the past month. You all seem like nice, normal people, and I can’t bring myself to believe you actually think children benefit from having access to books with sexually explicit content.
It’s possible some of you have bought into the so-called “banned books” narrative. I am puzzled by the term “banned book”, unless the meaning of the word “ban” has changed without my knowing it.
When a library chooses not to include a book in its collection, is the publisher prevented from publishing the book? No. Is anyone prevented from purchasing the book? No. Is anyone prevented from owning the book? No. Is anyone prevented from reading the book? No. Is anyone prevented from sharing the book with someone else? No. Is anyone prevented from bringing the book into the library? No. Is anyone prevented from reading the book in the library? No.
In short, does the library have any authority—legal or otherwise—relating to the creation, publication, distribution, or ownership of any book the library chooses not to include in its collection? No. So in what sense is the book “banned”?
Despite how illogical and myopic this narrative is, some of you may be sincere in your conviction and believe you are acting on principle.
For the rest of you, the best explanation I can come up with is that you didn’t want to take a moral stand for fear of being called nasty names. That may sound simplistic, even insulting. But I am of the opinion that at the end of the day we’re all just 5 year-olds in a sandbox. And these days the path of least resistance means allying oneself to the LGBTQ agenda.
Either way, while I would gladly have you all over for dinner, I would not let you babysit my kids. Not because you might do anything to them, but because you would not do everything in your power to guard their innocence. And innocence, once lost, can never be restored.
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