Alaska Library Board Retains LGBTQ Books in Youth Sections

HOMER, Alaska (AP) — An advisory board overseeing a public library in Alaska has voted to maintain scores of books containing supposed LGBTQ themes within the kids’s and younger grownup sections as a substitute of transferring them to a separate location after complaints have been made.

The Homer Public Library Advisory Board upheld the library director’s resolution final week to maintain the 55 books the place they’re at the moment situated, the weekly Homer News reported Wednesday.

Final fall, library Director Dave Berry denied a request to maneuver three titles. A later petition signed by greater than 500 individuals added dozens of books to the record.

The petition requested that books “selling transgender ideology, drag queens, homosexuality, and all different books that are meant to indoctrinate kids in LGBQT+ ideologies” both be eliminated or not be obtainable to kids “to come across these complicated concepts” within the kids’s library or within the juvenile part.

Berry consulted with workers on the library and denied the request. One other patron appealed to the advisory board, which has closing say.

The board’s four-hour assembly Jan. 17 included public feedback and the board contemplating the destiny of every of the books individually.

“The books that some wish to have eliminated are written for youngsters, really useful by library professionals and chosen by our personal library professionals as applicable for our group,” testified Nancy Lord, who stated she reviewed most of the books in query and investigated how the books are categorized, organized and organized.

“They belong within the kids’s part of the library,” she stated.

Madeline Veldstra, who appealed Berry’s resolution, famous the general public library eliminated a number of Dr. Seuss books in early 2021 attributable to what the library thought of to be racist content material.

Veldstra stated the library was prepared to manage books primarily based on the chance that kids may not be ready to come across racist content material.

“We each assume that sure subjects ought to be approached with parental steerage,” she stated. “So clarify to me why sexuality isn’t a type of.”

Berry stated he can relate to folks who go to the library and try to guard their kids.

“However we do have a duty to make sure that each mum or dad has the software to lift their very own kids the way in which that they see match,” he stated.

For the dad and mom who need their kids to solely learn books with heterosexual {couples} and nuclear households, he stated the library has 1000’s of books for them.

“There are 12,500 titles within the kids’s and younger grownup collections mixed,” Berry stated. “The 55 titles on this record characterize 0.4% of that assortment.”

He then requested the board to go away the books the place they’re, “in order that we will proceed to serve the whole group.”

Every e-book was upheld with no opposition from board members. One member famous that a number of the books didn’t seem to even have an LGBTQ side to them.

Homer, a fishing and vacationer group, is situated about 220 miles (354 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula.

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