What do “Twas the Night Before Pride” by Joanna McClintick and “A Child’s Garden of Verses” by the 19th Century poet Robert Louis Stevenson have in common? Their presence in an Arapahoe County library children’s collection was challenged last year.
The former is a celebratory picture-book history of the gay pride movement intended for children 4 to 8 years old contested for age appropriateness. The latter contains a poem written from the vantage point of a naive English child who muses about children around the world yearning to trade places. The prose winks with irony, for it is the British child who appears captivated by the exotic life of “foreign children.” Nonetheless, someone found the cultural comparisons insensitive.
As a member of the media and an Arapahoe County resident, do I have a right to know the names of the people who challenged these library books? Is there ever a compelling reason to have a book removed or moved from the library? How do we balance rights to privacy, access, and input at our public libraries?
These issues are at the center of a recent petition to the Colorado Court of Appeals. Last year, Gunnison County District Court Judge J. Steven Patrick ruled that the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) and Colorado library-user privacy law require libraries to provide copies of book disputes with the names of filers redacted.
The case concerns Crested Butte resident Rebecca White who filed a Request for Reconsideration of Materials with the Gunnison County Library District to remove or reclassify the book “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe because the book for young adults includes sexually explicit material.
Library district executive director Andrew Brookhart provided copies of the form, which included Whites’ name to Crested Butte News editor Mark Reaman per his CORA request. White unsuccessfully sought criminal charges against Brookhart for violating the library user privacy law. As more individuals submitted reconsideration forms, Brookhart sought judicial clarification of the law resulting in Judge Patrick’s ruling. The Gunnison County Library District, the Crested Butte News, and the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition have appealed.
Reaman told the court that the public deserves to know who is trying to remove or reclassify books and whether they are, in fact, a member of the community. Understandable, but to what end? So, such individuals can be confronted at the grocery store or harangued on Nextdoor, that bastion of thoughtful neighborly exchange?
Sometimes there are logical reasons for questioning a book’s presence on a library shelf. While you will find serious works like “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini, or “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, as well as harmless schmaltz like Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series on the American Library Association’s yearly lists of contested books, the vast majority of challenged books contain sexually explicit content inappropriate for children and teens.
According to the Colorado Library Research at the Colorado State Library, 83% of recent challenges regard books in the children’s and young adult sections.
Two of the most challenged books are “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison, which depicts oral sex between 10-year-olds and “Gender Queer,” a graphic novel that contains sexual images of two young adults engaging in oral sex with a fake penis and an image that depicts pedophilia, with an older bearded man and a young boy based on an actual work of ancient Greek pottery.
Health experts agree that children and young teens are not emotionally or physically ready for sexual activity and sexual debut should be delayed. Children exposed to sexually explicit material are more likely to participate in sexual activity earlier and engage in promiscuous and unsafe sex as teens and young adults. It makes sense to keep books with graphic sex in the adult section.
Rather than publically name those who challenge book placement, be it for frivolous or substantive reasons, the public is best served by transparent library policies. The Arapahoe Libraries website describes the policies and processes for book approval and for contesting a book.
Librarians select new purchases based on requests and critical reviews in alignment with the district’s collection development policies. The manager of library materials services responds to requests to remove books or relocate them to other sections of the library, and the decision can be appealed to the Board of Trustees.
David Britt, the manager of library materials services at Arapahoe Libraries, told me that requests for removal are rare but treated with respect for all concerned. Even when challenges are denied, as they were (I believe rightly) in the cases of the McClintick and Stevenson books, Britt always asks if there are other books petitioners would like to see on the shelves to represent their perspective. The library would rather add than subtract points of view. Other Colorado public libraries have similar policies that balance patrons’ rights to privacy, access, and input.
Krista L. Kafer is a weekly Denver Post columnist. Follow her on Twitter: @kristakafer
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