Is it Safe for Your School to Partner with the Public Library?

 

 

 By Gretchen Garrity

While the Nixa School Board in Christian County has been working to abide by state laws that prohibit giving minors access to obscene and pornographic materials, public libraries are resisting any such mechanism. 

The Nixa School District recently voted to restrict access or remove altogether six books in their school library. Meanwhile, the Christian County Library follows the American Library Association's (ALA) mantra that no materials should be "censored" and that whatever materials are in the library should be available to all patrons at all times. 

(From the Missouri Public Library Standards handbook)

 

The  ALA's code of ethics says in part, "We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources."

 This is part of the ALA Code of Ethics that the Missouri Public Library Standards handbook lists as an Entry Level Requirement for public libraries. The ALA, which receives about $230 million of taxpayer funding, has been subverting state and local libraries for decades. And unfortunately for many county libraries in Missouri, the state has allowed politically far left organizations like the ALA to dictate policy. Another requirement from the Missouri handbook is the mandate to "cooperate with other libraries (public, school, academic, special) to offer information, services, and programs for library users, such as interlibrary loan, reciprocal borrowing, and consortium access to collections."

PARTNERING WITH SCHOOLS

 

The Christian County Library accepts and endorses the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights, and its various interpretations, including the Statement of Intellectual Freedom and the Freedom to Read statement.

The county library's policy manual states,

"We support the Library Bill of Rights and the Freedom to Read Statement in providing free and open access to our materials for all age groups. Children are not restricted to particular areas of the Library. Our staff does not monitor the materials that children choose. The responsibility for the reading or viewing choices of children rests entirely with parents or legal guardians."

In other words, the library gives minors, some of whom are without a parent, free rein in the library, all the while placing sexually explicit books throughout the children and teen sections. Children are free to browse and read whatever they come across, without checking out any materials at all.

Parents have trusted the library to be a safe space for their children for generations, one of the few public spots where a child could be safe in both mind and body while a parent ran to the store or browsed the adult section. However, in spite of laws to the contrary, public libraries, including the Christian County Library, are providing obscene materials to children, indeed seeding them throughout the children and teen sections.

Missouri has passed SB 775, which prohibits schools from "providing explicit sexual material to a student if such person is affiliated with a public or private elementary or secondary school in an official capacity and, knowing of its content and character, such person provides, assigns, supplies, distributes, loans, or coerces acceptance of or the approval of the providing of explicit sexual material to a student or possesses with the purpose of providing, assigning, supplying, distributing, loaning, or coercing acceptance of or the approval of the providing of explicit sexual material to a student."

Violating SB 775 is a Class A misdemeanor that could result in a year in jail and a $2,000 fine.

THE MILLER TEST

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, in what has been termed the Miller Test, obscene material can be categorized in this way:

(1) whether the average person applying contemporary community standards would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;

(2) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically
defined by the applicable state law; and

(3) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

See a Citizen's Guide To U.S. Federal Law On Obscenity

WHY ARE PUBLIC LIBRARIES EXEMPT?

The books that were restricted or removed from the Nixa public schools, in compliance with state law, are currently available to children in our public library branches. Included:

Blankets, by Craig Thompson (a graphic novel) is in the Clever branch.

Unpregnant, by Jeni Hendricks is located in the Ozark branch

TheHandmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood; Illustrator Renee Nault (graphic novel version) is in the Ozark branch.

Empire of Storms by Sarah Maas is located in Nixa and Clever.

Lucky by Alice Sebold has been located to the Adult Section in Ozark. Minors have full access to the Adult sections of the library, which allows children to browse and select all kinds of materials that are dangerous to the minds of vulnerable youth.

 Here is Nixa School Board member Bridget Bidinger, giving the truth behind the memoir Lucky, a book that even the publisher pulled from publication:

That the county library is mandated to partner with local schools is more than problematic. Public libraries have become change agents, militantly pushing sexually explicit books on children. Whether they are aware or not, library staff are contributing to a political agenda that has nothing to do with providing a quality reading experience for children; instead, the library promotes smut and LGBTQ propaganda, among other ideologies not in keeping with community standards.

It makes no sense for obscene and pornographic books to be unavailable to minors at school, but easily accessible at the library.