Obscene books in the children’s and young adults’ sections of libraries is an ongoing debate among library patrons, liberal librarians, and conservative taxpaying citizens across America.
Earlier this year, Matanuska-Susitna Borough Manager Mike Brown suspended the existing Library Challenged Materials Policy process until further review, after community meetings on certain books became loud and contentious.
Now, the Assembly will consider creating a library materials review committee, modeled after the one created by the Mat-Su Borough School District. That school district policy is not without controversy, and has drawn a lawsuit from the Northern Justice Project and the ACLU for pulling books off the shelf in order to be reviewed by someone other than the school librarian.
The purpose of the proposed committee is to allow library staff to focus on providing services, while incorporating community into the review process, and provide libraries with a better understanding of the attitudes and opinions held by the community, the draft ordinance says.
The citizens advisory committee would serve in an advisory capacity only and would not act as a policy-making or decision-making body, according to the ordinance under consideration.
The suspension of the library book policy by borough Manager Mike Brown came after a Jan. 18 meeting, in which people requested that two books, “Red Hood” by Elana K. Arnold and “Identical” by Ellen Hopkins, both of which contain sexual material, be pulled from the young adult fiction section. A borough committee ruled at the time that the books should remain. These two books have been controversial across the country.
“Identical” is described by the publisher Simon & Schuster as having two protagonists who are identical twins: “Raeanne is the aggressive twin, the one who is sexually promiscuous—giving sex in return for drugs; she craves sexual attention from anyone, including her father. Kaeleigh is the quiet one, the one most like her mother, and the victim of her father’s sexual advances.”
“Red Hood” is a fantasy novel about sexual abuse and has sexually explicit passages graphically describing rape.
“The meetings have devolved into a shouting match and name-calling that is not producing a positive outcome for our community,” Brown wrote in his suspension of the library review policy. “I acknowledge the value of having a process for patrons to challenge material, but until such time as we can come up with a different approach, there is no value in continuing to put materials through the current process.”
The Mat-Su Borough Assembly meeting begins at 6 p.m. in the Assembly Chambers, 350 East Dahlia Ave., Palmer.
