Concerned parents are at last discovering that they wield enormous power in the culture war when it comes to fighting back against left-wing moral desensitization.
In Jamestown Township, Mich., 56 percent of voters shot down a proposal that would have renewed a property tax responsible for over 80 percent of the Patmos Library’s budget — marking the second time town residents have opted to defund the library.
As a result of this latest election result, the library faces the real prospect of having to shut its doors permanently.
This is part of the ongoing battle between library leadership and conservative members of the community, who are dissatisfied with the library’s refusal to remove LGBT-themed books with explicit sexual material.
The loss of funding resulting from the vote dealt a crushing blow to the library, which wrote on its Facebook page Thursday that it will be reducing its hours of operation due to shortages in staff. Library Board President Larry Walton had said in a statement last week that the Patmos Library would have to reduce its hours if the property tax were killed on Election Day.
Walton estimates that the library will be out of money by early 2024. It was first defunded back in August, but has been able to stay afloat for the time being thanks to hundreds of thousands of dollars in online donations.
The Hill notes of the ongoing struggle between the community and the library:
Jamestown Township community members in August voted overwhelmingly in favor of rejecting the renewal of the library’s property tax millage — the result of a successful pressure campaign led by the right-wing group Jamestown Conservatives that included accusations that the library was “grooming” children for sexual exploitation by making LGBTQ-themed books available to them.
“They are trying to groom our children to believe that it’s OK to have these sinful desires,” Jamestown Conservatives member Amanda Ensing told Bridge Michigan in August….
Most outrage has been directed at nonbinary author Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer: A Memoir” — one of the most frequently challenged books of 2021, according to the American Library Association.
Despite the mainstream media praise and awards lavished on Kobabe’s book, it features depictions of sex that detractors say is inappropriate for young audiences.
To keep the library running amid the defunding, Jamestown Township resident Jesse Dillman put together an online GoFundMe campaign after the first vote in August. But in a Friday update, Dillman wrote that he would bring the fundraiser to a close. It had thus far raised nearly $265,000 — including $50,000 in September from romance writer Nora Roberts. A second GoFundMe campaign raised approximately $8,000.
“As much as I appreciate the amazing support, I don’t think it’s right to continually limp our Patmos library along by private donations,” Dillman wrote in his update. “My intention here was to keep the library open long enough for a new millage vote within next year, which you all have made possible with your generosity.”
Before the Tuesday vote, the Patmos Library Board had stressed that despite the donations making it easier to “weather the crisis,” they were counting on the tax.
“However, we know very clearly that what this library needs to remain open over the long term is to pass the 10-year levy renewal in November,” wrote the board. “We cannot run the Patmos Public Library for the next decade without stable taxpayer support.”
The Hill reports that library staff members like former Director Amber McLain have resigned over the course of the last year due to the community’s insistence that LGBT kids books be taken down.
Opposition to the books has been led by a group known as Jamestown Conservatives, which argues that the library’s policies, including access to the books in question, is an instance of “grooming” children.
Libraries have become an important battleground in the culture war. The New American previously reported on the library at a U.S. Air Force base in Germany that hosted a drag queen story hour.
Drag queen story events have become a common method by which proponents of the LGBT movement attempt to instill ideas such as homosexuality, transgenderism, and pronoun confusion in young children.
The American Library Association, partnering with the Southern Poverty Law Center, has supported the organization of these drag queen story hours.
The Left understands that to destroy the moral foundation that makes America strong, they must control the flow of information to and corrupt the nation’s youth.
