Rutherford County in Tennessee is infamous for having illegally jailed thousands of juveniles over the course of two decades before a 2017 class-action lawsuit prompted a federal judge to put an end to it.
Now, as was first reported by The Tennessean, the same county is depicting itself as a protector of children as it decided whether to deny funding for any library whose shelves contain books it deems inappropriate.
“We are saying that we do not want to allow Rutherford County taxpayers to pay for books that we find explicit to children,” County Commissioner Craig Harris said of a proposed resolution at a Nov. 6 meeting of the county steering committee, which he chairs.
His proclamation of concern for the welfare of children would have been more convincing had ProPublica and NPR not reported that the county had incarcerated kids as young as 7 on charges as minor as truancy and cursing after juvenile jail staff deemed them “unruly.”
Those attending the meeting included Craig Tindall, the city manager of Murfreesboro, the county seat, which in June instituted a decency ordinance that prompted the county resolution.
The Murfreesboro measure was initially intended for drag performances, but its scope came to include library books. It specifically prohibited the city council from funding anything that exposed minors to materials “patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community.”
In response to that, the county had now promulgated its own resolution declaring it must ensure its funds for the library system “promote decency” and “maintain a family-friend environment” while protecting children from “materials reflective of prurient interests and inconsistent with the community’s standards.”
That meant the Rutherford library system, which gets 60 percent of its budget from the county and 40 percent from the city, would theoretically be subject to two decency standards—and the potential for the city and county to conflict over what should be on the shelves.
Harris came up with what he apparently thought was a genius solution to that but which might be one of the nuttier proposals to emerge from the book-ban fervor sweeping parts of the country.
“Why don’t you just pull your funding and do your own library?” Harris asked Tindall at the Nov. 6 meeting.
“There is a potential,” Tindall said. “It is possible to create an independent library from the regional system or independent from the Rutherford County Library, to create a new library or new library system.”
Yes, they were actually suggesting Murfreesboro—population 160,000—have two library systems. One would be funded by the county and have books it thinks are suitable, and the other would be funded by the city and contain only books that met its decency standard.
The insanity continued as Steven Sullivan, director of the county library system, suggested the librarians—who have largely been the voice of reason in the book-ban wars—might need to be replaced if all these standards, which also include a state law, are to be met.
Sullivan reported that library staff members are faced with going against a core belief that has seemed increasingly important as the county has grown culturally more diverse.
“The staff believes that if you have one member of the community that could benefit from [a book], then you're supposed to have it,” Sullivan said. “That's different than what the ordinance [says] and what I think we're challenged to do. We need to represent the majority of the community, not every single person of the community.”
He went on, “And I think that's the part that's been the biggest struggle: How do we get the staff to understand the goal and to come behind it when they’ve always been trained to see it a different way?”
Harris responded, “What’s concerning is you all are the governing body of that library, but it doesn't seem like your directives are necessarily being followed.”
Sullivan allowed that there had been some “pushback, instances of staff that is not willing or wanting to comply with the direction of the board.”
He added, “I don't know how we rectify that without literally replacing staff. I mean, what else do you do? And I don't want to get to that point.”
As the officials talked about building new libraries and firing people so that adolescents would not have access to books that have been available for years with no apparent apocalyptic results, 50-year-old Keri Lambert sat in the audience with her hand raised. For a whole hour.
Keri Lambert, who is part of the Rutherford County Library Alliance, has been active in opposing book banning since an Aug. 28 meeting of the library board.
“One of the board members slammed his hand on the desk, standing up, going, ‘I want names! I want the names of people that put these books in our libraries! You should be ashamed of yourself!’” Lambert recalled of that earlier meeting.
At the Nov. 6 county steering committee meeting, Lambert went unrecognized as Harris invited questions but called only on city officials. She was growing increasingly outraged and that made her all the more determined to keep her hand aloft.
“I was so angry and frustrated,” she later told The Daily Beast. “I was trying not to yell out or cause a scene or misbehave. So by holding my arm up, it gave me something else to focus on. It was a way of trying to behave myself because what they were saying was so outrageous to me.”
She persisted for so long that Harris finally called on her.
“I have been sitting at this chair for exactly one hour, and this person has their hand up for an entire hour,” he said. “And I'm gonna break my rule for one time and one time only. Ma’am, you can come up here since you held your hand up for one hour. I'm gonna let you have three minutes.”
Lambert responded with a blast of reason.
“When in the history of the world have the people banning books been the good guys?” she asked. “I feel like I'm living in the Twilight film listening to all of this.”
As she neared the end of her time, she was speaking about sex.
“Sex education is not child pornography,” she said. “You're talking about you can't look at sex until you're 18. At what age did you guys go through puberty? At what age did you become curious about sex? Did you go to your parents with all of your questions? Most kids don't.”
“We appreciate your passion,” Harris said. “Your three minutes are up.”
Lambert politely apologized for having to be told when to stop. She stepped away from the podium.
“Well, don’t say I don't give everybody a chance to speak,” Harris said.
Lambert could have spoken for far more than three minutes. And she intends to continue voicing her opinions at every opportunity.
“I believe libraries are one of the first lines of, in our defense of democracy,” she told The Daily Beast this week. “The right to fair and free access to information is so important. I can't stress how important that is.”
In a room full of bad ideas, Keri Lambert is one of the good guys.
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