I am a Flathead resident, children’s book author, magazine editor, concerned parent, and dedicated library user. My children and I go to our local library at least once a week, and I have always valued the diverse titles we have access to in a relatively small town.
It is incredibly important for both children and adults to find representative narratives that either speak directly to their identities and experiences, and/or allow them to learn about, appreciate, and empathize with cultures, orientations, or lived experiences different from their own. We are lucky to own a lot of books in our home, but we cannot purchase them all, and I have been sincerely grateful for the education library books have provided our family in recent years. I have tremendous respect and gratitude for our dedicated and hardworking librarians, and stalwart library trustees Connie Leistiko and Marsha Sultz. Qualified leadership and adequate resources are essential to library function and community health.
To suggest removing books from our libraries is censorship. It is ungenerous and dangerous for a million reasons. In a country as divided as we are, we should be seeking out diverse narratives, seeking to understand our fellow humans, not moralizing, removing legitimate material, and discounting their lives. I have friends who attempted suicide as teenagers in part because they could not find a single Queer narrative at their local library – they could not find support or insight and understanding there, and it made them, these children, so lonely and hopeless they wanted to die.
A healthy democracy does not support library censorship, and a lawsuit against the county over the First Amendment would be a waste of county funds, and frankly, an embarrassment. The board majority’s recent attempts to censor books, gut our libraries’ resources, and as far as I can tell generally run these crucial institutions into the crowd is disturbing, to say the least. Our residents and our librarians deserve far better.
Kathleen Yale
Columbia Falls