On Wednesday, more than a hundred people packed into an overflowing room at the Meridian Library District to voice their opposition to a plan to remove books primarily focused on LGBTQ themes and characters.
Nearly a hundred people testified in person or filed written comments to the board on Wednesday, but only fifteen of them asked that the books be removed from sale.
Some people, calling themselves “Concerned Citizens of Meridian,” claimed that employees at the Meridian Public Library were “grooming” kids to be more vulnerable to sexual assault.
Phil Reynolds, one of the group’s founders, said, “Even the briefest of scans will make it plain that these books have but one purpose: to introduce children to sex and make them more susceptible to manipulation.”
Books like “Gender Queer,” “It’s Perfectly Normal,” and the “Captain Underpants” series are all examples of this genre.
Officials at the library claimed that the majority of the titles were not kept in the children’s collection.
A woman yelled at the persons leaving the room and called them “groomers” from the LGBTQ community before being taken out by Meridian Police.
But the vast majority argued that parents should have autonomy in deciding what their children read.
According to Eric Gironda, who claimed to have grown up in the South during segregation, the library’s detractors were influenced by “lynch minds” and testimonies that drew parallels between themselves and the Ku Klux Klan.
Gironda then performed a short excerpt from the “South Pacific” (1949) Broadway hit, “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught.” The lyrics stress the importance of instilling into individuals a deep-seated bias against those who are different from themselves physically.
At the end of his presentation, he slapped a twenty dollar cash in front of Meridian Library District Board Chair Megan Larsen and asked the audience to donate as well. From the looks of things, she was able to raise at least $80 for the library that night.
Later, Larry Etter proposed what he called “a modest proposition” in the style of Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay of the same name.
Etter joked that the library’s children’s and juvenile literature should be destroyed because the section should be shuttered indefinitely.
“The general public should be aware that there are books on these shelves that depict animals walking, talking, and dressing like human beings,” he joked. Some of them are so brazen as to not even be wearing pants.
Wednesday night’s nearly three-hour meeting yielded no decisions, but the board does plan to meet again to explore the potential legal dangers of attempting to segregate specific volumes.
Just a few months ago, the Nampa School Board banned over two dozen books from its libraries, and Idaho legislative Republicans tried to punish librarians who lend “harmful literature” to children.