Wyoming Head Librarian Fired For Refusing To Remove Books

Illustration: Jianan Liu/HuffPost; Photos: Getty Images, Amazon, Google Maps In late July, the board of the Campbell County Public Library system in Wyoming voted 4 to 1 to terminate Terri Lesley, its longtime director. One woman said during public comment that her personal survey of the teen section indicated that 60% of the books were “witchcraft,” while another said that the library had become an “indoctrination center.” According to the Gillette News Record, community members challenged 29 books in 2021 and 2022, including “Gender Queer,” a memoir by Maia Kobabe, “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison, and “This Book Is Gay” by Juno Dawson ― all of which have been frequently targeted by right-wingers around the country. Among those standards is a firm opposition to book censorship in schools and libraries: A November 2021 statement from the ALA specifically condemned “censorship of books and resources that mirror the lives of those who are gay, queer, or transgender, or that tell the stories of persons who are Black, Indigenous or persons of color,” calling efforts to remove books on these topics “acts of censorship and intimidation.” “Libraries manifest the promises of the First Amendment by making available the widest possible range of viewpoints, opinions, and ideas, so that every person has the opportunity to freely read and consider information and ideas regardless of their content or the viewpoint of the author,” that statement said. “The ALA is a self-proclaimed socialist Marxist, activist group, and they’ve said this over and over, so this has absolutely nothing to do with targeting LGBTQ ideology or anyone’s lifestyles, which is the ALA narrative,” library board member Charles Butler told Wyoming Public Media about the new standards. “Then it culminated in a library director being terminated because she felt uncomfortable removing books from the library.” “They position the library and librarians as ‘groomers’ who want to ‘force woke agendas,’” Sorenson said.