Book banning fever breaks in town torn apart by conservative Christians’ opposition to LGBTQ+ books

A small town library in Michigan, the site of bitter debate over LGBTQ+ content in books, and forsaken by residents who voted to defund it over charges of “grooming,” is once again a quiet refuge for reading and learning.

For the first time in 18 months, no one got up to speak at the monthly Patmos Library Board meeting.

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“There’s not a single book that’s been banned in the State of Florida.”

“I think things have died down over there,” said Dean Smith, treasurer for the defunding effort, about the library and a controversy that tore the local community apart, Bridge Michigan reports.

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In August last year, voters in Jamestown Township rejected a ballot measure to renew a property tax that funds the library’s $245,000 yearly budget. The failed measure set Patmos on course to run out of money within a year.

The defund campaign followed a frenzy of book-banning efforts by local residents that started with one parent complaining about Gender Queer: A Memoir, asexual and nonbinary author Maia Kobabe’s graphic novel that has a few scenes about early sexual exploration. The book was shelved in the adult section, but the parent thought that it shouldn’t be in the library at all.

Months of ugly debate followed, with dozens of angry residents on both sides of the issue showing up to the library board’s monthly meetings.

The Heartstopper book series,  Spinning, and Kiss Number 8 were just of a few of the titles that would come under fire from frenzied book-banning activists.

A group called Jamestown Conservatives organized to campaign against the library, saying that its Pride Month display “promoted the LGBTQ ideology.”

“They are trying to groom our children to believe that it’s OK to have these sinful desires,” one book-banning activist said of library staff. “It’s not a political issue, it’s a Biblical issue.”

“I had to change my name on Facebook,” said library director Amber McLain at the time. “A woman came into the library filming on her cell phone. She said she was looking for ‘that pedophile librarian’ and ‘the freak with the pink hair.’”

McLain soon resigned.

When efforts to remove books from shelves stalled in the face of opposition from the library’s board and staff, a campaign to starve the library of funding began.  

“50% Millage INCREASE to GROOM our kids? Vote NO on Library!” read one sign across the street from Patmos, referring to the property tax that funds the library.

"Vote NO on Library" pic.twitter.com/juQ2W7kqhx

— Jason Scott (@textfiles) August 4, 2022

The funding measure failed, and the library made headlines around the world as people rushed in to fill the budget gap with a GoFundMe campaign, among them best-selling romance novelist Nora Roberts, who donated $50,000.

“It’s an honor for me to stand up for the Patmos Library and its staff,” said the author.

But in November, voters again rejected library funding, and the effects of the library’s budget and cultural crisis were starting to take a toll, with reduced hours and exhausted staff.

“Why did we close last week? I’ll tell you: We have a breaking point,” one Patmos librarian said at a library board meeting in a clip that went viral. “We have been threatened, we have been cursed.”

“I’m Catholic, I’m Christian, I’m everything you are. But I was taught to love your neighbor as you love yourself,” she said. “That’s not what I hear every day. Not from you!”

“I’m tired and I’m tired of all of you,” she told her righteous critics.

Librarians are sick and tired of MAGA culture wars, and they’re beginning to clap back!

I am 100% here for this 👏🏽 pic.twitter.com/c6LhEKbh0i

— Bhavik Lathia (@bhaviklathia) December 21, 2022

Almost a year later, that sense of exhaustion seems to have given way to accommodation, at least from the right.

All of the books that banning activists demanded be removed from shelves are still in the library, though Gender Queer now occupies its own shelf behind the circulation desk, available by request.

Book banners were also mollified with an agreement to add labels to every title in the library’s 90,000 book collection explaining its content, as described by publishers or sellers like Amazon, a process that could take years.

For now, the library seems to have returned to a sense of normalcy.

Dean Smith, from the defunding campaign, pointed to efforts at accommodation from both sides in the debate as one reason for the quiet.

“To what extent those compromises have calmed the waters will be seen on Election Day.”

That’s when Jamestown residents return to the polls for the third time in 15 months to vote on library funding.

Said Smith of any new campaign to starve the library into submission, “I have the checkbook, and there’s $3.36 in it.”