{"id":1802991,"date":"2023-01-12T03:04:28","date_gmt":"2023-01-12T08:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1802991"},"modified":"2023-01-12T03:05:25","modified_gmt":"2023-01-12T08:05:25","slug":"how-a-public-library-used-third-party-allies-and-listening-sessions-to-dismiss-flak-over-pornographic-kids-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/how-a-public-library-used-third-party-allies-and-listening-sessions-to-dismiss-flak-over-pornographic-kids-books\/","title":{"rendered":"How A Public Library Used Third-Party Allies And \u2018Listening Sessions\u2019 To Dismiss Flak Over Pornographic Kids\u2019 Books"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">34<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fhow-a-public-library-used-third-party-allies-and-listening-sessions-to-dismiss-flak-over-pornographic-kids-books%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1802991&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47-->\n<p>What are the responsibilities of public libraries? <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/12\/07\/public-libraries-are-becoming-cathedrals-of-wokeism\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rising concerns<\/a> About their transformation into advocates of radical racial or sexual ideology Just like any bureaucratic agency would deal with bad PR: hiring \u201cimpartial\u201d third-party experts who share librarians\u2019 ideological opinions, hosting carefully managed and curated \u201clistening sessions,\u201d producing dull, complicated documents that minimize criticism of the bureaucracy. At least, that\u2019s what\u2019s happening at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mrspl.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mary Riley Styles Public Library<\/a> (MRSPL) in Falls Church, Virginia.<\/p>\n<p>MRSPL in November hosted a forum to solicit community input on the library\u2019s 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 \u2014 including the library featuring youth-oriented pornographic \/or sexually explicit material such as \u201cLawn Boy,\u201d \u201cGender Queer,\u201d \u201cThe Pants Project,\u201d and \u201cAll Boys Aren\u2019t Blue\u201d \u2014 were largely minimized or ignored.<\/p>\n<p> <strong>Potemkin Meetings, Enigmatic documents<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s collections. \u201cI can\u2019t possibly pre-read every single book my eight children bring home,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201cReThinking Libraries\u201d 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 \u201cfindings book,\u201d This 163-page document contains all the information collected through the community forums as well as written surveys.<\/p>\n<p>One of the ReThinking Libraries staffers directing the follow-up meeting discounted all the children\u2019s surveys because, he claimed, they were all clearly filled out by parents (several of Horne\u2019s children completed the survey without their parents\u2019 input). A member of the Library Foundation, which fundraises for the library, dismissed Horne\u2019s 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. \u201cnot pornographic\u201d and that different people had different standards of what material was too sexually explicit for adolescents (that\u2019s not exactly true, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/criminal-ceos\/citizens-guide-us-federal-law-obscenity\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">According to the current U.S. federal law regarding obscenity<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI thought it was incredible that no staff brought up the issue of sexually inappropriate material in the findings review or in the retreat,\u201d Horne told me. \u201cIt was such a repeated issue in the surveys and yet there was no acknowledgment of it by the staff. \u2026 I walked away suspicious that there wasn\u2019t any point to this, feeling \u2018fake listened to.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p> <strong>Inadvertently misrepresenting community concerns<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>A meeting of the Library Board of Trustees that took place the day after the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8216;I walked away suspicious that there wasn\u2019t any point to this, feeling fake listened to,&#8217; said one parent who spoke out at the Falls Church library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":658,"featured_media":1802994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[8066,8755,8110,6919,14509,4247,5318,9878,14510,3799,13175,13678],"class_list":["post-1802991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist","tag-allies","tag-books","tag-dismiss","tag-federalist","tag-flak","tag-kids","tag-library","tag-listening","tag-pornographic","tag-public","tag-sessions","tag-third-party"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1802991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/658"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1802991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1802991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1802994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1802991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1802991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1802991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}