Kimber Gliddon was the administrator of the county library in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. She resigned last August, after nine months on the job, because, as she put it, “nothing in my background could have prepared me for the political atmosphere of extremism, militant Christian fundamentalism, intimidation tactics and threatening behavior currently being employed in the community.”
The trouble began in February, when a parent asked the library if it had a copy of “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe. The library said it didn’t. The parent’s intent, it soon appeared, was not to read the book, but to lodge a complaint if it was actually in the collection. The matter might have been dropped at that point, but the parent had obviously been following media coverage of library protests across the country and wanted to find grounds for creating a confrontation with the library’s policies.
So, the parent, and other activist fundamentalists, switched their target. Their new complaint was that such books, though not there now, might someday become part of the collection, and, should that happen, their children would be endangered. The library, they asserted, should have an acquisition rule that forbade it to buy such books, i.e., books that the religious right regarded as immoral and potentially harmful. They were especially concerned about books that discussed gay (or non-gay) sexuality and contained explicit accounts of, or depicted, sexual activity and used colloquial language in doing so.
In the end, the right-wing activists demanded that the library board pledge never to buy any of the 400 books on a well-known list of putatively dangerous and immoral books. The fact that the library’s collection contained not one of those 400 titles did not seem to impress or mollify the activists, even though that absence might suggest that the protestors had exaggerated the seriousness of the problem.
This controversy over non-existent pernicious books continued for months. Meetings of the library board of directors were disrupted; a recall movement for all-but-one member of the library board was initiated; supporters of the library staged a “read-in”; veiled threats were made by the protesters, and Ms. Gliddon was harassed and vilified until she resigned.
It might be argued, I realize, that a regrettable incident such as this was not entirely unexpected in Bonners Ferry, since it is located in an oddball part of Idaho. It’s in Idaho’s panhandle, close to the Canadian border. It’s five miles from Ruby Ridge, where white-supremacist Randy Weaver had his stand-off with the FBI in 1992. It’s an area known as a retreat for radical, militant right-wing types, including right-wing Christians. The sudden eruption of radical-right Christian protest might, therefore, be simply a product of local extremists.
But similar challenges to school and public libraries have occurred all over the country, and the pattern suggests a nationally planned strategy. Republicans have apparently decided that intimidation on the local level can be effective. Violent confrontation might not work at the U.S. Capitol, but in small towns and cities, threats of force are not something government officials are accustomed to dealing with. Consequently, if a town has enough angry, dedicated people who are willing to go to meetings of the city council or library board and disrupt and threaten city officials, those people might just get what they want. It’s pretty clear that such bullying tactics are just what the Republicans have in mind for our upcoming elections, when the targets will be election officials and poll workers.
You might, nonetheless, regard the Bonners Ferry protests as a perfectly reasonable exercise of citizen rights. If so, let me discuss briefly what those protestors were asking their library to do: Essentially, they asked it to abandon a principle that ranks at the top of any librarian’s list of professional obligations — the protection of intellectual freedom.
It is not accidental that every year the American Library Association celebrates what it calls Banned Books Week (which we happen to be in the middle of as I write this), during which libraries across the country put up displays of books that some subset of the public has said shouldn’t be available for anyone to read. There is such a display at the ISU library right now.
The point of such displays is to remind us that there are always books that some people find offensive and would like to ban. There are always ideas circulating that some people abhor and think should be suppressed. But what we believe, in this country, is that ideas must be free to circulate; they must have their opportunity to be tested and appraised by the people. Most importantly, government must not be allowed to decide which ideas the public is allowed to encounter and which should be concealed from it.
I was what is called a collection development librarian at ISU’s library for 30 years. In selecting which books the library should buy, I applied a variety of criteria. I cared, for example, whether or not a book was clearly written; whether its topic was currently of general or scholarly interest; whether reviews of the book by those who were knowledgeable in the book’s subject area attested to its relevance, importance and factual accuracy. I never decided to not acquire a book because someone, including myself, thought the book’s ideas to be mistaken, dangerous or potentially harmful.
So, neither I, nor the acquisitions librarian in Bonners Ferry, were empowered to decide which books were “worth reading” in some absolute sense. Our role was to disseminate ideas, not decide which ideas our borrowers should or shouldn’t be exposed to. And, in the case at hand, the librarians at Bonners Ferry faced another problem: The fundamentalist Christians of Bonners Ferry were asking them to refuse to make books available to local children and young-adults that implicitly regarded homosexuality as an acceptable sexual option. If the library had agreed to that request, it would have officially approved, and acted to promote, the religious doctrines of one particular Christian sect. That would have violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution and the rights of every atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Buddhist or non-fundamentalist Christian who happened to be a resident of Bonners Ferry.
Let me clarify one final issue: I do not claim that the citizens of Bonners Ferry had no right to question the practices of their county library. In fact, I think that they had a legitimate complaint about the library’s acquisitions policy. But the question they should have put to the library was: “Why haven’t you bought at least some of those books on the 400 list?”
Leonard Hitchcock of Pocatello is an alumnus of the University of Iowa and did graduate work at Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, San Diego. He taught philosophy in California and Arizona for 15 years. In 1985, after earning a library degree, he was hired by Idaho State University. He retired from ISU’s Oboler Library in 2006.