Earlier this month, I sat in the public meeting of the Arkansas State Library Board and listened as board member Jason Rapert gave an impassioned reading of the raunchier parts of "Gender Queer: A Memoir" by Maia Kobabe and "All Boys Aren't Blue" by George M. Johnson--two memoirs that can be found in various Arkansas libraries.
Rapert, a former Arkansas state senator (R) and founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, has called on his former legislative colleagues to abolish the library board over these and other books. Unwilling to censor Arkansans' reading, and citing existing guardrails around adult material, the library board has consistently stonewalled his proposals to withhold funding from libraries where minors might access works like the ones he read aloud.
And what a reading it was.
When Rapert gets going, he has the cadence of a preacher. Makes sense for a man who's spent his life in politics and religious leadership. As he intoned the excerpts about Kobabe's confusing pubescent fantasies and Johnson's first sexual encounter in college, I was reminded of the more sexually explicit passages of the Bible.
What I heard in Rapert's reading was no more vulgar than the story of Lot's daughters getting their dad blackout drunk with the express intent of raping him.
At a break in the meeting, I found myself standing next to Rapert at the refreshment station. So I asked him how he planned to handle the smuttier parts of the Bible if he gets his way tightening library restrictions.
"What we've done for 2,000 years," he said as he swiftly walked away from me. "Common sense."
He was dismissive, but mine was a serious question.
Recent state and local initiatives to restrict Arkansans' access to public library books have faced court challenges. In September, a judge ruled a Crawford County library violated patrons' First Amendment rights when it segregated books with gay themes--regardless of genre or intended reading level--to one isolated section of its stacks. Another court issued a preliminary injunction last year against Arkansas Act 372, which would have rolled out new pathways for removing books from general circulation based on vague challenges to their "appropriateness." The same act would have made felons of librarians who ran afoul of those ill-defined standards.
To be clear: Libraries are not lawless places.
Public libraries are already beholden to federal and state rules governing obscenity and minors. Arkansas public libraries have challenge policies for community members who object to books. They also have appeals processes to ensure access to information isn't withheld for unconstitutional reasons. Books like "Gender Queer" and "All Boys Aren't Blue" are shelved in the adult and young adult sections. If that's not enough, parents who want more oversight have a right to join their children at the library and set family rules about media safety.
The great irony of this fight is that the very law that protects our right to read aloud from a memoirist's disappointing encounter with a sex toy at a public meeting on a Friday--the First Amendment--is the same law that gives us the right to gather and discuss the value of Ezekiel's image of adulterous wives who melted their jewelry into gilded "male idols and engaged in prostitution with them" on a Sunday.
There is no standard, evenly applied, that would limit our access to one of these books and not the other.
Which brings us back to "common sense."
The library board is wise to reject any motion to micromanage the millions of books in circulation in our state. They know better than to establish any policy that would infringe on our constitutional rights.
On the surface, the movement to restrict library holdings claims to be about protecting kids from sexually explicit materials. But as that's already happening, and Rapert refuses to acknowledge the un-American threat his own standards pose to our sacred books, the subtext is that this is a movement to impose one narrow interpretation of theological values on the reading public.
How unpatriotic to undermine the First Amendment in this way. It's also, to borrow a phrase from William Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus," a cruel, irreligious piety.
By the way, if you've never seen "Titus," it's a chilling treatise on what happens when politicians govern with an unyielding devotion to religious doctrine. The outcome is horrific. But I won't spoil the ending.
You have a right to read it in the library.
Sammy Mack is a writer living and working in Little Rock.