It takes a village to run a library

You already know about the new library statute—Act 372—which eliminates an exception in obscenity law for librarians, formalizes a process for local elected officials to exercise their inherent authority overseeing libraries, and reinforces the long-standing criminalization of knowingly providing minors harmful material.

Nate Coulter, director of the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS) covering Pulaski and Perry Counties, has mischaracterized the law since its genesis and filed suit to block it. He complains it “strips the library board of the ultimate determination about what stays in a library collection.”

But library boards never had that “ultimate” authority. Although largely dormant or delegated until Act 372 created a procedure for citizens to activate its use, that power always belonged to the elected governing body in the relevant jurisdiction.

Indeed—channeling his long history in politics—Coulter’s current commentary isn’t cabined to decrying laws implementing democratic oversight on CALS. (He was the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor against Mike Huckabee in 1996.) Coulter just as freely denounces local government actions in Benton:

“[T]he Saline County Quorum Court … voted to require the library to move age ‘inappropriate’ material away from children. While that sounds innocuous at some level,” said Coulter, “it is both impractical and a form of censorship.”

It’s impractical to move sexually graphic media away from kids? How challenging is it to have a children’s section without erotica? (Maybe Chuck E. Cheese needs to be consulted. I would’ve said Disney—but, well, you know.)

Equally silly is Coulter’s loaded claim that keeping transgressive content from children is deserving of the knee-jerk accusation of “censorship.” After all, we already screen our children’s media. Good parents don’t show 8-year-olds “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or read them “The Shining.” Call me old-fashioned (or reasonable), but the idea that kids shouldn’t be able to stumble upon such material in a children’s section of a library strikes me as remarkably uncontroversial.

By Coulter’s characterization, every library already seemingly engages in censorship, because no library buys every book. Each considered decision by library leaders to acquire one item is a choice not to invest in another. Have these librarians just censored patrons from accessing books deemed insufficiently worthy to purchase? (No.)

Would Coulter order Larry Flynt’s compendium of Hustler magazines if a customer requested it (assuming such a book exists)? I doubt it. That doesn’t make Coulter a censor.

Contemporary face-melting over the simple notion that children’s sections should only contain children’s materials reads even more bizarre upon recognizing that once purchased, books are cataloged, coded, and placed according to topic and genre by trained specialists. Thus, every book is already screened.

But to library nihilists, if you then ask the same highly skilled librarians to further differentiate based on age appropriateness— as longstanding law has done for years—somehow you’re a book banner. (That flaccid invective is too clever by half.)

At bottom, the question is whether public libraries should be required to have safe spaces for children to roam as freely as Whole Foods’ certified-organic pheasants that lay heirloom $9-a-dozen anycolor-but-white eggs served by Hillcrest glitterati at ’90s-revival artisanal-quiche radical-equity book-club brunches? (Shouldn’t our children have at least as much consideration as PETA-protected hens?)

But some seemingly prefer libraries to be figurative minefields where parents must guide their children as if traversing the concertina-wire aisle of Tractor Supply. Not me.

It’s ironic that progressives want to purge every “offensive” word from public schools to protect helicopter parents’ delicate sensibilities, but to these same precious petunias, libraries must be unlimited in what they foist upon children.

‘‘Huckleberry Finn’’ in the classroom: no way! How-to books on sexual gratification shelved in libraries’ children’s sections: absolutely! If you disagree, you’re a racist and a book banner, respectively—they say.

If it takes a village to raise a child—as we’re told—that community ought to be able to say what’s available to kids at the local bookery. Otherwise, government is raising our children, and we’re the village idiots for letting it happen.

Saline County elected officials are pursuing further changes to retake control of government by the governed. A proposed ordinance, if enacted at this week’s monthly Quorum Court meeting, will delineate the county administrator’s operational control of the Saline County Library.

Both Coulter’s lawsuit against Act 372 and the claims of the library leadership opposing the Saline County proposal seemingly derive from the same mis-impression that county libraries somehow operate as an independent branch of government not answerable to elected county officials.

Oh, the hubris.

The problem with this claim is that the Arkansas Constitution explicitly states that all county employees either report directly to the county administrator or his subordinates. The buck already stopped with him. The difference now is that the people are aware.

One Saline County legislator soundly observed that the proposed ordinance “makes a lot of sense, because every other department in the county is answerable to an elected official, and I think the Saline County Library should be no different.”

I should say so.

This is your right to know.