‘Grooming’ Accusations Result In Town Voting To Defund Its Library

When the good people of Jamestown, Michigan, went to the polls earlier this month to vote in their primary election, they chose candidates for governor, for Congress as well as state and county lawmakers. They voted to approve proposals to improve the roads in their western Michigan farming town and to fund their fire department.

A third proposal, however, drew more votes than any other. Several hundred people turned out, just to reject the one proposal that comes up only once every decade: To renew taxpayer funding for their town’s public library.

All because of one book that the librarians refused to remove.

On August 2, according to official Ottawa County election results, 3,045 residents of Jamestown, population just shy of 10,000, voted to defund the Patmos Library, its one and only book lender, following a successful anti-LGBTQ+ campaign first reported by the Washington Post.

Those behind the movement to strip the library of its financial support posted fliers and planted lawn signs all around Jamestown, accusing librarians of “grooming” children—a term used to describe the actions of adults who build relationships to manipulate and coerce children into sexual abuse—and promoting an “LGBTQ ideology.” They claimed bookshelves dedicated to young readers featured same-sex pornography. They called the staff pedophiles, and they called themselves the “Jamestown Conservatives,” and formed a private Facebook group.

The library staff is now down from five to three, after its former director and her replacement quit, as the Post reported. Its former director, Amber McClain, 3o, is described by the newspaper as openly queer, pink-haired and beloved by patrons.

That is, until November 2021, when controversy erupted over this one book, which McClain chose to make available at the Patmos Library.

The most banned book in the United States

Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, was among 10 winners of the Alex Award, presented to young adult books by the American Library Association in 2020. It’s the life story of a nonbinary person, raised as a girl, who doesn’t feel they are either male or female.

A year later, their memoir was named “the most banned book in the country” by the A.L.A. and the free speech organization PEN.

It wasn’t just its LGBTQ+ content that sparked controversy. The 239-page graphic novel’s illustrations were seen as sexually explicit. The Post’s Danielle Paquette explained those illustrations in detail: “masturbation, a sex toy and oral sex, as well as depictions of menstrual blood,” she wrote. “Fans saw the scenes as part of the author’s coming-of-age experience, while critics blasted them as sabotage to developing minds.”

Kobabe’s memoir made headlines last fall when a Washington State high school pulled the book from its library shelves, but one angry parent wasn’t satisfied. They asked county prosecutors to charge school officials with distributing obscene material, claiming Gender Queer contained “graphic pornography to include pedophilia.” According to the Kitsap Sun, the prosecutor reviewed the book and declined to file charges.

Once the book arrived in Jamestown, McLain initially placed it in the adult section, near novels with heterosexual sex scenes, she told the Post. But she moved Gender Queer behind the counter once objections started to pour in, and made it available only upon request. “We have to represent every segment of the population,” McLain told the paper, “not just the vast majority.”

As The New York Times reported, the book’s arrival coincided with a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ Christian conservative pressure on Republican-led legislators, demanding they take action against transgender rights and gender-affirming healthcare. GOP lawmakers in two dozen states have already put forward a series of copycat laws targeting trans youth.

Some bills would criminalize providing medically accepted treatment to transgender children; others ban discussions of gender identity and sexuality in some elementary school grades. Many more restrict trans and nonbinary youth from participating in sports teams that align with their gender identity or using school bathrooms or locker rooms for that same reason.

It wasn’t long before outrage over Kobabe’s book started to boil over in Jamestown, a deep-red, overwhelmingly conservative Christian community. One woman showed up at the library in March, recording herself on her phone while shouting, “Where is she? Where is the pink-haired freak? Where is the pedophile librarian?”

McLain quit. Her replacement soon transferred to a library in another town, and declined to say where, for fear of harassment over Gender Queer.

“The complaint is that kids are going to pick it up and see things they can’t unsee,” Matthew Lawrence, 25, told the Post. “The easiest way to avoid that is to parent your children.”

“I’m not a ‘groomer’”

One of the librarians still on the job, Kaitlyn McLaughlin, 34, also spoke to the newspaper. She’s the youth services librarian, and she said she tells patrons her only “agenda” is promoting literacy.

“I’m not a ‘groomer,’ ” McLaughlin told the Post. “I’m not a pedophile. I’m afraid of what people see when they look at me.” She said that she worries that the harassment they’ve experienced at the library in the last few months could lead to violence. McLaughlin earns $16.25 an hour at the library, and works a second job at a senior home to make ends meet.

According to the Post, the Patmos has enough money in its coffers to last until late 2023, and they’ve lobbied to get the funding issue back on the November ballot. They hope to win hearts and minds to their side before the midterm elections. There’s already a GoFundMe, started by a local resident, that’s so far raised $172,000—which is still tens of thousands of dollars short of the library’s annual budget.

“Unprecedented number of attempts to ban books”

But this controversy isn’t just a Jamestown problem. As Marisa Dellatto reported in Forbes in April, the volume of crusades like this reached all new highs in 2021, what the American Library Association called an “unprecedented number of attempts to ban books,” more than have ever been recorded in the 20 years the A.L.A. has been collecting data.

The majority of the books being targeted contain LGBTQ+ themes and/or authors, as well as subjects related to Black culture and/or Black authors.

Harper Lee’s classic novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, was trending on Twitter recently for being included in a list of books supposedly banned in Florida. That list even caught the eye of actor Mark Hamill.

As the Associated Press and a conservative Florida news site reported, the list turned out to be inaccurate. Backers of Gov. Ron DeSantis, his campaign staff and his official spokespeople trolled reporters and crowed about this on Twitter for days. The actor best known as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films tweeted a correction, noting he stood by his opinion that the list is still “an excellent recommended reading list.”

An NBC News reporter observed that the fake list fooled many people simply because it involved the Sunshine State.

Even if the state board of education is recommending schools use To Kill A Mockingbird in their classrooms, there are plenty of places in Florida banning books.

In fact, it’s the third largest book-banning state, according to a report by PEN America, which noted 204 books had been banned in at least seven Florida school districts from July 2021 to March 2022. Only Texas, with 713 books banned, and Pennsylvania, with 456, bans more books. The seven Florida counties are Brevard, Clay, Flagler, Indian River, Orange, Pinellas and Polk counties, and the books banned in Florida include Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

What is also still true is that one Florida county has put warning labels on more than 100 books that deal with LGBTQ+, sexuality and race issues.

Collier County officials told the Naples Daily News those books can still be checked out, but will bear the warning labels in accordance with the state's Parents' Bill of Rights Law, signed by DeSantis in March, just days before he signed the bill derided by critics as the “Don’t Say Trans or Gay” bill. The pair of laws gives parents rights relating to their minor child's education, upbringing and health care, and prohibit school instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.

The label states: “This book has been identified by some community members as unsuitable for students” and goes on to say that the decision over whether or not the book is suitable for students is up to the parents.

"I think we just need to understand that this isn't the result of librarians reviewing these books to my knowledge carefully or in a considered manner," PEN’s Jonathan Friedman said. "That isn't the result of an internal library process. It's the result of a political pressure campaign to force the district to comply with one group's objectives and ideology."

PEN America reviewed the 110 books with advisory labels and found:

• 47 titles (46%) are stories that have sexual content, including educational books about sexual health.
• 46 titles (42%) are stories that have LGBTQ+ characters or themes.
• 34 titles (31%) are stories that have protagonists or characters of color.
• 16 titles (15%) are stories that have transgender characters or themes.
• 10 titles (9%) are children’s picture books.

"Many of these books are children's books. They are books about families, they are books with simple stories," Friedman told the Naples Daily News. "You're basically saying that this one group gets a kind of final say more important than what's already described on a dust jacket."