Public goods that serve everyone are under attack, a recurring story in America
When a wealthy suburban town votes to defund its own public library while continuing to fund other public amenities like road improvements and the fire department, you know something is deeply dysfunctional in America. But that’s exactly what just happened in Jamestown Township, a conservative community southwest of Grand Rapids, Michigan, after a small but vocal group of about 50 local residents started demanding this spring that the library remove books depicting LGBTQ people and same-sex relationships in a positive light.
According to Bridge, a nonprofit newsite that covers Michigan, the attacks got personal quickly. The director of the Patmos Library in Jamestown, Amber McLain, who is gay, was harassed online, forcing her to change her name on Facebook. In March, she told Bridge, “A woman came into the library filming on her cell phone. She said she was looking for ‘that pedophile librarian’ and ‘the freak with the pink hair,’” a reference to her. Soon afterwards, she quit.
“Libraries are for everyone, not just the majority,” McLain added. “When I was director at Patmos, there were just under 67,000 books. The removal of one may not seem like much, but when you consider that there are maybe 50 books with LGBT representation in that 67,000, each one counts. The beauty of a public library is that you don’t have to read everything you find,” she said. “There is something for everyone, and there’s likely something to offend everyone. Additionally, it is important to remember that the library having a book does not equal the library endorsing that book — it just means the library is attempting to have a balanced collection.”
This past Tuesday, township voters rejected a renewing a property tax called a millage that would provide the lion’s share of the library’s annual budget. The tax would cost someone with a $250,000 home about $24 a year. The vote wasn’t even close: 1,905 to 1,142, or 62% to 37% opposed. Ten years ago, the same levy was approved overwhelmingly.
What’s changed is the empowerment of religious fanaticism. Jamestown Conservatives, the group that led the pressure campaign against the library, describes itself on Facebook this way: “This group was created to help others of the community to be aware of the pushed agenda of explicit sexual content that is being infiltrated into our local libraries aiming toward our children. We stand to keep our children safe, and protect their purity, as well as to keep the nuclear family intact as God designed.”
After voting Tuesday, Amanda Ensing, one of the organizers of the Jamestown Conservatives group, told Bridge reporter Ron French. “They are trying to groom our children to believe that it’s OK to have these sinful desires,” Ensing said of library officials. “It’s not a political issue, it’s a Biblical issue.”
Jamestown isn’t the only place in Michigan where so-called conservatives have organized to ban books about LGBTQ topics from their libraries, but it is the only one, so far, to defeat a library budget request over the issue. It’s possible that some people who voted against the funding thought they were only sending a message to the library’s board and that it wouldn’t actually shut down. But the board’s president, Larry Walton, said he didn’t believe the library needed a wake-up call and shouldn’t remove books. “A wake-up call to what? To take LGBTQ books off the shelf and then they will give us money? What do you call that? Ransom? We stand behind the fact that our community is made up of a very diverse group of individuals, and we as a library cater to the diversity of our community,” he said.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, many communities in the South chose to close public facilities like swimming pools rather than integrate them, a choice that the Supreme Court even countenanced in a 1971 ruling, Palmer v Thompson, that held that a city could choose to not provide a public facility rather than maintain an integrated one. Many northern communities also stopped building large public pools and millions of white Americans started paying to swim in private rather than mix with Blacks. As Heather McGhee wrote in her excellent book The Sum of Us, “today we don’t even notice the absence of the grand resort pools in our communities; where grass grows over former sites, there are no plaques to tell the story of how racism drained the pools. But the spirit that drained these public goods lives on. The impulse to exclude now manifests in a subtler fashion, more often reflected in a pool of resources than a literal one.”
White support for public goods started dropping during this same period and has never recovered, McGhee notes. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Jamestown Township is 92% white. While the language of exclusion here is focused on gays, lesbians and transgender people, the same people upset about books affirming those identities are equally angry about efforts to address racism in America. The backlash in Jamestown isn’t really new; it’s a reminder that we haven’t really made much progress since the 1950s.