How A Public Library Used Third-Party Allies And ‘Listening Sessions’ To Dismiss Flak Over Pornographic Kids’ Books

What are the responsibilities of public libraries? Rising concerns About their transformation into advocates of radical racial or sexual ideology Just like any bureaucratic agency would deal with bad PR: hiring “impartial” third-party experts who share librarians’ ideological opinions, hosting carefully managed and curated “listening sessions,” producing dull, complicated documents that minimize criticism of the bureaucracy. At least, that’s what’s happening at Mary Riley Styles Public Library (MRSPL) in Falls Church, Virginia.

MRSPL in November hosted a forum to solicit community input on the library’s future direction. Surveys were also offered by the library for public input. Kids were encouraged to participate. Yet as multiple local residents told me, their concerns — including the library featuring youth-oriented pornographic /or sexually explicit material such as “Lawn Boy,” “Gender Queer,” “The Pants Project,” and “All Boys Aren’t Blue” — were largely minimized or ignored.

Potemkin Meetings, Enigmatic documents

Logan Horne, a Falls Church resident and a home-schooling mother to eight children, and her husband attended open library meetings. During the first meeting, Horne voiced her opposition to the growing inappropriateness of the young adult and children’s collections. “I can’t possibly pre-read every single book my eight children bring home,” She added. Another local resident who wished not to be named expressed his concerns about graphic novel content that was highly sexualized to MRSPL staff.

The Falls Church Library director invited Horne to a one-day follow-up retreat, which was more limited in scope and guided by two members from a third-party organization called “ReThinking Libraries” This program aims to assist libraries in their development and marketing. A total of 25 community members, staff and people involved in local politics attended the event. The event also included reviewing the “findings book,” This 163-page document contains all the information collected through the community forums as well as written surveys.

One of the ReThinking Libraries staffers directing the follow-up meeting discounted all the children’s surveys because, he claimed, they were all clearly filled out by parents (several of Horne’s children completed the survey without their parents’ input). A member of the Library Foundation, which fundraises for the library, dismissed Horne’s complaints, challenging her to go out into the stacks and find something that was inappropriate. This same staffer also said that young adult books containing sexual content were inappropriate. “not pornographic” and that different people had different standards of what material was too sexually explicit for adolescents (that’s not exactly true, According to the current U.S. federal law regarding obscenity). 

“I thought it was incredible that no staff brought up the issue of sexually inappropriate material in the findings review or in the retreat,” Horne told me. “It was such a repeated issue in the surveys and yet there was no acknowledgment of it by the staff. … I walked away suspicious that there wasn’t any point to this, feeling ‘fake listened to.’”

Inadvertently misrepresenting community concerns

A meeting of the Library Board of Trustees that took place the day after the