Dear Editor:
Most people would not want the 98 books promoting illicit LGBTQ+ activity on our children’s bookshelves at our taxpayer-funded county library. The commissioners are ultimately over the library, but the two administrators are Mr. Glenn Kennedy and Mr. John Luton.
Opinion
Problems: The reconsideration (challenge) form for a book is difficult and takes 2-14 months: the new form implies a need to have violence, sex, and drugs but only one problem is enough to ask for it to be moved or removed. The flowchart does not flow. Challenges cannot be done on any book more than once every two years, so if a book has been challenged in the past two years, your request will be thrown away. If the librarian doesn’t agree with your verbal complaint, you can write up a reconsideration form online. If the library committee denies your written request, then you can ask for an appeal to the Library Board. The librarian doesn’t have to take the Board’s recommendation. The person who challenged the book may end up going to several meetings before the book comes up. Few challenges succeed. The bureaucracy is intact, at the expense of the youngster who wanders into the Young Adult room, which for about fifteen years was the Teen Fiction Room. Community Standards are ignored. At the Library Board meeting yesterday, no books were decided on, and the nine books listed will be addressed in coming months, the can kicked down the road.
Some hope: the Middle Ground book area for 5th through 10th graders was recently created behind the Juvenile section. Let’s add the classics (located downstairs) to Middle Ground. Move Young Adult Fiction books into the Adult section. Repurpose the Young Adult Fiction room for Reference or anything less damaging than the porn currently in that room.
Priscilla Bence
Martinez, GA
