Christian city officials wants to close public library over book about trans people

St. Marys, Kansas Commissioner Gerard Kleinsmith is on a crusade against the local library because the library has books about LGBTQ+ people.

“This author is absolutely wrong. God does not make mistakes,” he said at an April city commission meeting about the book Rethinking Normal: A Memoir in Transition by trans author Katie Rain Hill. “God cannot make a mistake. We can make mistakes. Mankind can make a mistake. God cannot make a mistake… I will do everything I can to fight this kind of garbage.”

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Angry librarian tells off conservative Christians protesting library in righteous speech

“We broke. Deal with it. We’re human. I’m tired and I’m tired of all of you,” she said, angry about the threats and the signs calling her ugly names.

“If God makes you as a male, you are a male. If God makes you a female, you are a female, no matter what.”

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He and his allies on the city commission – many of whom are members of an extreme religious sect that broke away from the Catholic Church – want to shut the library down.

“Some things are wrong,” said Commissioner Richard Binsfeld about the transgender books in the library. “If you live up to your morals, if you stand by your morals at all, you’d look at it and say, ‘Why do we have it?’”

The Pottawatomie Wabaunsee Regional Library has operated largely without controversy for decades. The current director – Judith Cremer – has had her job since 2003, and she said the controversy over the books started last year.

Since the library isn’t a part of the city government – it’s managed by its own board of trustees appointed by the Pottawatomie and Wabaunsee County governments and serves several small towns in the area – the city can’t shut it down. Instead, they are trying to pull its lease since the library operates in a city building.

“We’re not part of the city structure and the lease agreement is the only leverage that they have seemed to be able to find,” Cremer told the Kansas Reflector. The city commission tried to take away the library’s lease last year to force the library to agree to a clause in the lease that would ban all LGBTQ+ books and books about “socially divisive” topics, but the library refused. The commission voted to renew the lease for another year in December after getting pressured by the public to keep the library open.

The city commission seems “to be continuing down that road [of trying to pull the library’s lease], which I’m disappointed with because we have still been here doing our job, trying to help people, trying to do summer reading, and I feel like it’s a misunderstanding of who we are. We are trying to do our job and we have followed the rules,” Cremer said.

In that April meeting the mayor of St. Marys, Matthew Childs, stepped in, asking the library to stop “promoting certain types of material.”

“If the library is [lending out LGBTQ+ books], we come back to the question, do we want to renew it at all?” he said.

The library put together an advisory committee to work towards reconciliation with the community, but they haven’t achieved their goal yet. And religious people in the town are still demanding the library pull LGBTQ+ content.

Resident Stephen Murtha said that the library should reflect Christian people’s views.

“As we move forward, we would like to see that all LGBTQ+ media — whether audio files, movies, books, activities, etc. — be removed from this branch altogether and from any access, including online ordering and inter-library loans, to any minor through this branch,” he wrote in a letter to the library board.

But Cremer thinks these complaints are coming from a small, but vocal, minority in the community.

The ACLU of Kansas sent a warning to the city commissioners that they could be violating the First Amendment by shutting down the library because it carries books they don’t personally agree with.

“Each member of the commission should remember that their own discomfort with a certain book does not justify restricting its availability to everyone else in the community,” said Sharon Brett of the ACLU of Kansas. “Not only is this potential censorship authoritarian, it has implications under even a basic reading of our First Amendment. We urge the commission to remember their obligations under the Constitution.”

Cremer still believes the library and the commissioners can cooperate.

“We’re providing services to the community,” she said. “We’re taking care of the same people. I don’t see why there should be a problem.”