‘Grooming’ Accusations Result In Town Voting To Defund Its Library

When the good people of Jamestown, Michigan, went to the polls earlier this month to vote in their primary election, they chose candidates for governor, Congress as well as state and county lawmakers. They voted to approve proposals to improve the roads in their western Michigan farming town and to fund their fire department.

A third proposal, however, drew more votes than any other. Several hundred people turned out, just to reject the one proposal that comes up only once every decade: To renew taxpayer funding for their town’s library.

On August 2, according to official Ottawa County election results, 3,045 residents of Jamestown, population just shy of 10,000, voted to defund the Patmos Library, its one and only book lender, following a successful anti-LGBTQ campaign first reported by the Washington Post.

Those behind the movement to strip the library of its financial support posted fliers and planted lawn signs all around Jamestown, accusing librarians of “grooming” children and promoting an “LGBTQ ideology.” They claimed bookshelves dedicated to young readers featured same-sex pornography. They called the staff pedophiles, and they called themselves the “Jamestown Conservatives,” and formed a private Facebook group.

The library staff is now down from five to three, after its former director and her replacement quit, as the Post reported. Its former director, Amber McClain, 3o, is described by the newspaper as openly queer, pink-haired and beloved by patrons.

That is, until November 2021, when controversy erupted over a single book, which McClain made available at the Patmos Library: Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, named “the most banned book in the country,” according to the American Library Association and the free speech organization PEN.

It wasn’t just its LGBTQ+ content that sparked controversy; The 239-page graphic novel’s illustrations were seen as sexually explicit. The Post’s Danielle Paquette explained those illustrations in detail: “masturbation, a sex toy and oral sex, as well as depictions of menstrual blood,” she wrote. “Fans saw the scenes as part of the author’s coming-of-age experience, while critics blasted them as sabotage to developing minds.”

The book made headlines last fall when a Washington State high school pulled the book from its library shelves, but one angry parent wasn’t satisfied. They asked county prosecutors to charge school officials with distributing obscene material, claiming Gender Queer contained “graphic pornography to include pedophilia.” According to the Kitsap Sun, the prosecutor reviewed the book and declined to file charges.

Once the book arrived in Jamestown, McLain initially placed it in the adult section, near novels with heterosexual sex scenes, she told the Post. But she moved Gender Queer behind the counter once objections started to pour in, and made it available only upon request. “We have to represent every segment of the population,” McLain told the paper, “not just the vast majority.”

It wasn’t long before outrage over the book started to boil over. One woman showed up at the library in March, recording herself on her phone while shouting, “Where is she? Where is the pink-haired freak? Where is the pedophile librarian?”

McLain quit. Her replacement soon transferred to a library in another town, and declined to say where for fear of harassment.

“The complaint is that kids are going to pick it up and see things they can’t unsee,” Matthew Lawrence, 25, told the Post. “The easiest way to avoid that is to parent your children.”

One of the librarians still on the job, Kaitlyn McLaughlin, 34, spoke to the newspaper. She’s the youth services librarian.

“I’m not a ‘groomer,’ ” McLaughlin said as she gathered children’s books for a lunchtime story hour. “I’m not a pedophile. I’m afraid of what people see when they look at me.”