For 12 years as a youth librarian in northern Idaho, Denise Neujahr read and befriended children from diverse backgrounds. Devotees or atheists, homosexuals or heterosexuals, everyone was welcome until one night in November 2021, when about two dozen teenagers arriving at the Post Falls library for a Team Rainbow meeting were met with a scandal.
Members of a local church waved signs with images of hellfire and used a megaphone to shout Bible verses and accusations about pedophile stalkers in the library. The library beefed up its security. But the following month, police arrested a protester outside who was carrying a knife and a loaded gun.
In May, religious conservatives won a majority on the library board and named a member who had called Team Rainbow a “sex club” president. Neujahr, who created the group as a craft, snack and conversation program for LGBTQ youth and his parents, that funding for the group was in jeopardy. But she refused to dissolve it.
As libraries have become the new battlegrounds in America's culture wars, the people who normally preside over these silent sanctuaries are now eThey are fighting against groups that demand the massive withdrawal of books. Last year, More than 150 bills in 35 states aimed to restrict access to library materials and punish library workers who did not comply.
“We no longer see a parent chatting with a teacher or librarian about a book their child is reading,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. “We are seeing partisan groups demanding the removal of books that they have been told are bad and that they are not even reading.”
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's 900-page ideological blueprint for a potential second Trump Administration, declares that “pornography, manifest today in the pervasive spread of transgender ideology and the sexualization of children,” must be stripped of its constitutional protection and declared illegal. “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned,” he says. “Educators and public librarians who provide it should be classified as registered sex offenders.”
As chief of law enforcement in Anderson County, Tennessee, Sheriff Russell Barker had handled narcotics, assault and other criminal investigations. Last year, after residents said they had found pornographic titles in County libraries, local officials asked him to determine whether two of the titles violated the state's obscenity law: “Let's Talk About It: A Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships and Being a Human”by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan, and “Gender Queer,” a 2019 graphic novel-style memoir by Maia Kobabe, which is the most banned book in the US.
Three weeks later, Sheriff Barker said he planned to follow library policy and file a request for the library to restrict children's access to the two books. He said some content offended him personally, but did not violate state or federal law. “This is about freedom in America,” he added. “My warning would be that if we start removing those books, we could start an avalanche of everyone questioning anything they don't agree with. And we get into censorship issues that would really be outside the limits of what our country is.”
In March 2023, Neujahr won the American Library Association's Lemony Snicket Award for Noble Librarians Facing Adversity. The award, reported in the local media, made her a target. One online commenter threatened to “gut me like a fish,” she said.
Neujahr left the Community Library Network in Idaho in the fall and now directs youth services for the library system in Spokane, Washington, a half-hour drive away. The job is a promotion, but he acknowledges his disappointment that Team Rainbow was no longer welcome in the library. She still leads the group, but it meets at a Lutheran church.
““This is a difficult time for any teenager to grow up and experience life, regardless of what their identity is.”Neujahr said. “I just want them to finish high school and know that things will get better.”
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