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Campbell County library board vets policy changes proposed by Florida nonprofit

By
Jonathan Gallardo with the Gillette News Record, via the Wyoming News Exchange

GILLETTE — A proposal to revise the Campbell County Public Library’s collection development policy drew criticisms from library board members and the library director, who said that if approved, it would give librarians an “impossible task.”
 
During a two-hour workshop Thursday at the Campbell County Recreation Center, the library board went through proposed revisions to the policy that were put forth by the Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit based in Florida, and specifically by Hugh Phillips, an attorney associated with the group.
 
The Liberty Counsel is a nonprofit organization based in Orlando, Florida, that provides free assistance and representation to advance “religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family,” according to its website.
 
The proposed changes include a new policy to protect minors from sexually explicit materials and would not allow for sexual education books to be in the library, no matter what section.
 
In last week’s discussion, board members decided to reject proposed changes to the nonfiction section, and they debated what does and doesn’t apply to the library, legally speaking. 
 
No action was taken, and they will take this up again at their March 27 meeting.
 
This is the third workshop the library board has held on the collection development policy. In the first two, they went through the current policy, page by page, suggesting changes where they saw fit.
 
Board member Charlie Anderson said he thought that the board was coming close to a workable solution, up until the Liberty Counsel got involved.
 
“This draft is such a rabid departure from everything we talked about before,” he said. “We’ve wasted our time on the last two discussions.”
 
The policy to protect minors from sexually explicit materials, as it’s written, would “conform the entirety of the Library’s collections to the standards established by the Library Board and requirements of the Children’s Internet Protection Act.”
 
Library board chair Sage Bear said her intent is not to have this policy cover the whole library and that she’d like for the proposed language to cover the library’s collections in the children’s area and the teen room.
 
“Sexual books should not be in areas marketed towards minors,” she said.
 
Anderson had issues with the inclusion of the Child Internet Protection Act, or CIPA, and questioned its applicability in this situation. It was enacted in Congress in 2000 to help protect minors from accessing obscene material online.
 
Anderson said CIPA is “completely inappropriate” for this policy because it has to do with internet access, not books. Specifically, it applies to schools and libraries who receive federal dollars for discounted internet rates.
 
“The obscenity standard is the standard we’re stuck with,” Anderson said.
 
“Well, that’s not what these lawyers are saying,” Bear said.
 
“The lawyers who are not practicing lawyers in Wyoming?” Anderson asked.
 
Bear said she’s talked to multiple lawyers, not just ones who are with Liberty Counsel, and “I’ve been assured (CIPA) does apply.”
 
Moving certain books from the teen room to the adult section doesn’t prevent a teenager from getting to those books, Bear said.
 
“We’re running a huge risk that when you move a book, exclusively for the purpose of making it harder to get for the audience that it’s aimed for, you’re violating their Constitutional rights,” Anderson said.
 
“I agree, Charlie, there will be a risk, but we’ve never before in this nation had so much sexual content pushed on kids,” Bear said.
 
The revised policy also states that the library director shall ensure that no material is added to the library that is a “visual representation of a person or portion of the human body which depicts nudity or sexual conduct, sexual excitement, sexual battery, bestiality, or sadomasochistic abuse, or which is otherwise harmful to minors as defined by CIPA or inappropriate for minors as determined by the Library Board,” or anything that contains “explicit or detailed descriptions or narrative accounts of sexual excitement or sexual conduct.”
 

 
Library Director Terri Lesley said it’s “administratively impossible” for the library staff to read through every book that comes into the library and expressed frustration about the revisions.
 
“How am I supposed to do this? I can’t read every book. How can I guarantee these things? It is an impossible task for me,” Lesley said.
 
Librarians have many other tasks to do, she added, from helping patrons to putting on programs to working on projects. Having them screen every book is going to take away from those other tasks.
 
Board member Chelsie Collier wondered if the library should order fewer books at a time, or if the library staff should figure out a better balance.
 
Bear said the challenge policy will allow the public to help catch any inappropriate books that the librarians miss. Lesley replied that she doesn’t feel that’s how the policy reads.
 
“It sounds like I’ve done something wrong right from the start if I can’t guarantee this stuff,” she said. “That’s how it feels.”
 
Bear said she’s heard countless times from library staff that the board should “trust the experts,” yet with this proposal, all she hears is that the staff can’t do it.
 
Lesley said while she and her staff know what goes into shelving a book in a certain place, that doesn’t mean they’ve read every book.
 
Board member Darcie Lyon worried about the added burden that the proposal puts on librarians.
 
“I think this is going to be too hard for the staff,” she said.
 
Lyon added that the library board is getting too in the weeds with this stuff.
 
“What I feel is, we’re making this so hard and so micromanaged,” she said. “I just don’t get it, what are we doing with this?”
 
It all comes down to the definitions, Lyon said, and deciding on those definitions is easier said than done.
 
“Where are we with kissing? Is that sexual excitement? What is sexual excitement? Each of us has our own definitions,” she said. “What’s the definition for sexual conduct?”
 
“Body parts grinding,” Bear said.
 
The proposal included changes to some of the collection criteria for certain nonfiction areas, including the adult and young adult medical sciences section and the young adult social sciences section.
 
The board unanimously rejected these changes.
 
In the adult applied sciences section, the current policy says the library develops and maintains “a collection of sources on child development and sex education.” The proposed change would remove “sex education” from the policy.
 
Under young adult applied sciences, it removes “sexual activity and diseases, pregnancy, birth control, sexual hygiene” from the list of allowable topics in the medical sciences section and adds “family life education” and “pregnancy.”
 
And under youth social sciences, it removes a sentence that says “diverse perspectives of young adult sexuality are also developed and maintained.”
“This showed me what they really had in mind was going through the whole collection,” Anderson said.
 
“I think (it) was a little aggressive,” Bear said.
 
She said she was fine if these revisions were stricken and for this part of the policy to remain as is. She said she was OK with keeping these topics in these sections because they’re nonfiction and deal with important issues kids are going through at that age.
 
“I just don’t want physical descriptions of body parts working together,” she said.
 
“Educating people about this stuff is different from writing a narrative about it,” Collier pointed out.
 
The proposal also would have allowed any resident in the county to challenge a book, even if they don’t have a library card.
 
“I think this is awful,” Anderson said. “Why in the world do we want to give someone the right to challenge books in the library, if they don’t even go to the library?”
 
He supported limiting challenges to parents and people who have a library card.
 
Bear said that because the library is paid for by tax dollars, any taxpayer should have the right to challenge a book, regardless of whether they have a library card.
 
“To challenge a book they’ve never read?” Anderson asked.
 
The library’s challenge form asks the person behind the protest whether they’ve read the book.
 
“If they’ve never read it, that’s noted in the form,” Bear said. “That will be taken into consideration, right? And if it’s a bad book, what difference does it make?”
 
“That just seems silly to me,” Anderson said. “That seems like a great way to get more protests with less buy-in from the person who’s protesting.”
 
He worried that this would lead to people challenging books they haven’t read because they saw them on an activist’s list.
 
Bear said this was not a hill she was willing to die on.
 
The library board directed Lesley to take all of the recommended changes to the proposal and put them into a draft a week before the board’s next meeting, on March 27. At that meeting, the board will finalize the rough draft and set a date for a public hearing when people can voice their opinions on the proposed changes.
 
This story was published on March 14, 2023.

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