Marys Vice-Mayor Francis Awerkamp, a Republican who also serves in the Kansas House, said he wouldn’t support the public library in any form because of the LGBTQ material it housed. Marys, a town which is already heavily conservative and contains a large religious population associated with the Society of Saint Pius X. Gino said the commissioners’ actions would damage transgender and LGBTQ youths in St.

Mary’s commission’s insistence on banning items containing content they don’t like could have constitutional implications when it comes to library patrons’ rights to free expression and the right to receive information.” “The residents of the various cities served by the library have a First Amendment right to the targeted content,” said Sharon Brett, legal director of the ACLU of Kansas. The ACLU condemned the actions of the commission and said it will monitor the situation. The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas issued a statement in support of the library Wednesday, urging that the library continue to be funded and that the commission abandon the ban of these materials. The commissioners will vote on the lease in early December. At the latest commission meeting, officials discussed allowing the library to have a short-term lease while they decided if the library met the “moral standards” of the commissioners. The library refused to accept the “morals clause,” and commissioners remain undetermined on whether or not they’ll allow the library to stay in the St. The lease stipulated that the library not “supply, distribute, loan, encourage, or coerce acceptance of or approval of explicit sexual or racially or socially divisive material, or events (such as ‘drag queen story hours’) that support the LGBTQ+ or critical theory ideology or practice.” Marys city commissioners asked the library to accept a lease clause that would remove all books that dealt with sexuality, race, or LGBTQ themes. Parent Dave Perry demanded the book be removed from the library, saying the contents were unsuitable for children and encouraged “chemical castration.”įollowing Perry’s demands for removal, St. “Melissa” had only been checked out four times from the library when it became the center of uproar this summer.

Marys after it made the William Allen White Award 2017-2018 Master List for grades 3-5. The book, which was published in 2015, was added to the Pottawatomie Wabaunsee Regional Library in St.

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