Defund the Libraries!

I suspect the residents of Jamestown, Michigan would not defund their police.

Reading US library defunded after refusing to censor LGBTQ authors: ‘We will not ban the books’ from The Guardian leaves me with one conclusion: Americans have become cowards so afraid of the wider world they hide by banning books, closing their libraries. Ignorance is not virtue; enforcing ignorance only proves the enforcers lack of faith in their virtues.

The controversy in Jamestown began with a complaint about a memoir by a nonbinary writer, but it soon spiraled into a campaign against Patmos Library itself. After a parent complained about Gender Queer: a Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, a graphic novel about the author’s experience coming out as nonbinary, 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 to target other books with LGBTQ+ themes.

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 A group calling itself Jamestown Conservatives handed out flyers condemning Gender Queer for showing “extremely graphic sexual illustrations of two people of the same gender”, criticizing a library director who “promoted the LGBTQ ideology” and calling for making the library “a safe and neutral place for our kids”. On Facebook, the group says it exists to “keep our children safe, and protect their purity, as well as to keep the nuclear family intact as God designed”.

Dear Jamestown, you would be safer defunding your police.

sch 8/6/22