Don’t kill this small Eastern WA town’s public library over a few books | Opinion
A group of residents in Dayton want voters to close their local library because it has more than 150 books that they deem inappropriate. Centuries ago, barbarians used flame and sword to destroy the illuminated knowledge held in Europe’s Christian monastic libraries. Today, their tools are bullying, misinformation and the ballot box.
As The Seattle Times reported, rural Columbia County residents submitted enough signatures last month to place a measure on the November ballot to dissolve the Columbia County Rural Library District.
Residents of the county pay property taxes through the district to fund the library in Dayton, a small town 60 miles east of the Tri-Cities.
The dispute started a year ago over one book on display in the young adult section, “What the T?” which contains supportive information for trans and nonbinary teenagers. Other books about gender, sexuality and race soon joined a growing list that angered a small cadre of residents.
At first the library resisted calls to remove the books. Eventually it agreed to move them out of the young adult section and into the adult nonfiction section. That compromise to retain books but not highlight them for young adults should have been the end of it.
But it wasn’t. The agitators would brook no compromise and say they have lost all trust in the library. An argument that will appear in the voters’ guide supporting the measure sums it up, “Whether there can be short term appeasement on this issue is immaterial, because in the process of dealing with it, a greater truth has been revealed that this public library is an irretrievably compromised entity, and it needs to be removed from our midst.”
A handful of people would kill a community institution that provides access to knowledge to all residents in a malicious quest to squash ideas. There is no room for others to decide for themselves. This is what censorship looks like in the 21st century.
The books in question are a miniscule portion of the library’s collection, and the backers of the measure are willing to throw everything away to get rid of those few titles. If the measure passes, Washington would earn the embarrassing distinction of being the first state in which voters chose to shut down their local library over a book dispute.
Healthy debates about public institutions are great. This, however, is part of an unhealthy national social war being fought between the liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. In Washington, there have been recent fights over books in Walla Walla, where the school board refused to capitulate to demands from conservative censors, and in Liberty Lake near Spokane, where the mayor vetoed an ordinance attempting to seize control of library policy so the city could ban the book “Gender Queer.”
The Columbia County library does itself no favors in its defense by not stocking prominent books that are critical of the LGBTQ+ movement. Popular books censored by progressives like “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” and “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” do not appear in the library’s catalog. Nor do hard copies of any works by conservative commentators Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, though those at least are available in ebook format.
Due to a quirk in how the district was created, only voters outside of Dayton will vote on the measure. That means only about 1,000 of the county’s 2,856 registered voters will decide the fate of the library, though all of them pay taxes to support it.
If parents don’t want your kids to read certain books, help them find others. Better yet, they should expose their kids and themselves to myriad ideas and voices that will foster a love of learning and a mind that can think critically and creatively. Libraries should be the place to do that.
