Christopher Wiggins at The Advocate:

A county government in central North Carolina has dissolved its entire public library board after trustees voted to keep a children’s picture book about a transgender character on library shelves, turning a local book challenge into one of the most severe reprisals yet in the national campaign against LGBTQ-inclusive materials. The Randolph County Board of Commissioners voted 3–2 last week to dismiss all members of the county library board, weeks after trustees declined to move or remove Call Me Max, a picture book about a transgender boy who asks his teacher to use his chosen name. The decision followed a public hearing that drew nearly 200 residents and revealed a community split almost evenly between those calling for the board’s removal and those urging commissioners to respect the library’s review process.

Library staff and trustees had reviewed the complaint earlier this fall and, in October, voted to keep the book in the children’s section, concluding it complied with the county’s collection policies, local CBS affiliate WFMY reported. Commissioners nonetheless moved to dissolve the nine-member board outright — a step allowed under North Carolina law but rarely taken. [...] Opponents of the book claimed the dispute was a matter of child protection. Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the conservative North Carolina Values Coalition, which urged supporters to attend the commission meeting, argued that Call Me Max teaches children that their parents may be “wrong” about their gender. The book has been banned by several school districts and was prominently invoked by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022 while promoting his so-called “don’t say gay” legislation restricting classroom discussions of gender identity, a law later challenged in court. To critics, the Randolph County episode demonstrates how procedural safeguards are increasingly overridden when LGBTQ+ inclusion is at stake. Kyle Lukoff, the book’s author, who is a trans man, said the case is especially troubling because the library followed its own policies and was still punished.

Oriol Poveda at LGBTQ Nation:

In December 2025 – shortly after North Carolina’s Asheboro Public Library board voted to keep Call Me Max, a children’s picture book about a transgender boy, on its shelves – the Randolph County Board of Commissioners dismissed eight out of nine library trustees without giving a reason.  Betty Jo Armfield, one of the dismissed, was shocked. “I felt frustration, anger, and grave concern for the library staff and for the public that accesses the library,” she told LGBTQ Nation.  For Armfield, what stung most was not just the dismissal itself, but what it signaled about the future. “This dismissal has set a dangerous precedent,” she said, “and I wonder what will happen if the next appointed board does something that the commissioners perceive as against their personal beliefs. Will the next board also be subjected to the same treatment?” 

The question keeps her up at night, as does her concern for the librarians, who must now do their jobs under a cloud of political scrutiny. Across the United States, library boards, librarians, and public officials who have refused to remove LGBTQ+-inclusive books have faced retaliation with increasing frequency and severity. In 2024, the Warren County Board of Supervisors in Virginia took control of its local public library after the institution resisted demands to remove books with LGBTQ+ content. In Jamestown Township, Michigan, residents voted twice in recent years to defund their public library over LGBTQ+-themed titles, a campaign that ultimately drove several librarians to resign. In Florida, the Escambia County Public School District pulled more than 1,600 titles from its shelves pending review in late 2023. The books under review included the The Diary of Anne Frank and the The Autobiography of Malcolm X. 

These cases are only a small sample, but the pattern is consistent: Local officials, pressured by organized conservative groups, are punishing the professionals whose job it is to serve everyone. In Randolph County, three commissioners chose to go further than most, dismantling the oversight body designed to make these decisions independently. But the people they dismissed are not going quietly.

The controversy began in October 2025, when a patron complained about Call Me Max, a 2019 picture book by award-winning transgender author Kyle Lukoff. The board followed its own established procedures for reviewing challenged materials and voted 5-2 to keep the book in place. As reported by the public radio station WFDD, the book is the only one of the nearly 20,000 books in the library’s children’s collection to reference questions of gender identity. Even the commissioners who moved to dissolve the board acknowledged the trustees had followed the rules. Yet three of them, Darrell Frye, Kenny Kidd, and Lester Rivenbark, voted to fire them anyway. Two dissented, including Commissioner Hope Haywood, who noted dryly that her colleagues “felt like, just abolish the board and then figure it out.”

John Russell at LGBTQ Nation:

The anti-LGBTQ+ former chair of the Crawford County, Arkansas, Library System board was arrested last week, along with three other people, for allegedly plotting the kidnapping of her own developmentally disabled adult daughter. According to local CBS affiliate 5News, an arrest warrant for 59-year-old Tammi Hamby alleges that she cooked up the November 17 kidnapping “as a scare tactic” to prevent her 22-year-old adopted daughter, Jami, from interacting with strangers online. Hamby’s husband, Jeffrey, told the outlet last week that the couple had grown concerned over the past six months that Jami had “developed a relationship” with someone online who claimed to be country singer Luke Bryan.

“We tried everything, and she has not stopped communicating with him, and he was going to get her. He was going to take her. And so, my wife, without my knowledge, with her aide and a couple of their friends, tried to do an intervention,” Jeffrey said. Court documents allege that Tammi Hamby approached her daughter’s in-home nursing assistant, Shannon Yazmin Yvonne Childers, about the plan, and Childers recruited David Quach and Nico Austria to help carry it out, according to both 5News and the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Austria and Quach reportedly lured Jami from her home on November 17, claiming they would take her to meet Bryan. They then drove her to a field where they demanded money from her before zip-tying her wrists to a tree and leaving her, all while Tammi Hamby watched from a distance.

While Tammi allegedly planned to “rescue” her daughter, Jami was able to free herself and ran to a nearby house where the residents called 911. The Crawford County Sheriff’s Office deputy who responded to the call said that Jami “was in fear for her life and clung tightly to a teddy bear” the entire time he interviewed her. Tammi Hamby, Childers, Quach, and Austria all turned themselves in at the Crawford County Detention Center on December 3. On Friday, all four were charged with conspiring to kidnapping, first-degree false imprisonment, abuse of an endangered or impaired person, third-degree battery, and second-degree terroristic threatening, according to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Jeffrey Hamby defended his wife following her arrest last Wednesday, suggesting in an interview with 5News that local law enforcement had driven her to such extreme measures with their inaction after the couple reported that their daughter was interacting with an alleged online predator.

[...] The Hambys previously made headlines for their crusade against LGBTQ+-inclusive children’s books in local libraries. As Hemant Mehta notes in his Friendly Atheist newsletter, beginning in 2022, Tammi Hamby leveraged her position on the Crawford County Quorum Court, which has the power to withhold funding from the library system, to pressure the Crawford County library board to remove LGBTQ+-inclusive books from libraries’ children’s sections. In a letter to local pastors, the Hambys claimed that the only reason to include LGBTQ+ books in the libraries’ children’s sections “is grooming a generation of children to feel this is normal and an accepted way of life.” Mehta also notes that the Hambys were supported by the River Valley City Elders, which he describes as a Christian Nationalist community organization.

Christopher Wiggins at The Advocate:

A Tennessee library director is drawing national support after refusing to relocate LGBTQ+ children’s books, citing the First Amendment. In a message sent this week to the Rutherford County Library System board, Director Luanne James said she would not comply with an order to move more than 100 LGBTQ+ titles from youth sections to the adult area. “Restricting access to these materials through subjective relocation or removal constitutes a violation of the community’s right to information and a direct infringement on the principles of free speech,” she wrote in a letter to the board of the Rutherford County Library System on Wednesday. She called the board’s vote “a clear act of viewpoint discrimination” and said carrying it out would violate both the First Amendment and her professional obligations. “Therefore, I will not comply,” she wrote. The Rutherford County Library Board voted on Monday to relocate more than 190 books, many involving LGBTQ+ themes, from children’s and teen sections to adult areas following a review of “age-appropriate” materials.

Good on Rutherford County Library Director Luanne James for defying an order to relocate LGBTQ+-related books from the youth section to the adults section.

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Claire Wang at The Guardian:

For decades, libraries served as a safe haven for many queer and marginalized youths in eastern Texas, says former county library director Rhea Young. Unlike the school cafeteria, the library was a space where they could explore and find acceptance in who they wanted to be. “There were books where they can find characters like them, and realize it’s okay to be who they are,” Young said. “There needs to be more places like that, not fewer.” That all changed two summers ago when, amid a wave of book bans, Montgomery county officials asked Young to move books with LGBTQ+ themes or “sexually explicit” content at the public library into a section restricted to readers 18 years and older, and instructed her to order more titles with conservative Christian content. One of the books she was told to pull was It’s Perfectly Normal, the popular illustrated book that teaches children about puberty, sex and sexuality. Young had bought the book for her own 10-year-old son two decades ago when he expressed curiosity about his changing body. She said it later helped him come to terms with his identity as a transgender man.

But Young decided that she couldn’t follow a policy that devalued the experiences of her son and other marginalized children and teens. In January, Young was fired, in what she felt was retaliation for refusing to impose the county’s political agenda. Seven months later, she fought back again: this time suing the county judge and commissioners for wrongful termination. “I was pretty majorly depressed and angry,” Young said. “They took who I was away from me.”

As the culture wars descended on America’s public libraries, librarians like Young have moved to the frontlines of a battle to protect free speech and LGTBQ+ rights. In at least half a dozen states, they have joined forces with civil rights groups to oppose book bans, often facing personal and professional repercussions. Some of their legal challenges and victories, organizers and experts say, can provide a roadmap for grassroots resistance against coordinated censorship campaigns.

In October, Wyoming library director Terri Lesley won a $700,000 settlement after a yearslong dispute with officials in deeply conservative Campbell county. After refusing orders to remove books like Cory Silverberg’s Sex is a Funny Word and Juno Dawson’s This Book Is Gay – two queer-inclusive sex ed books – from the children’s collection, Lesley said she lost her job and was repeatedly labeled “pedophile” and “groomer” by conservative activists. A librarian for 27 years, Lesley said she’d considered herself more a public servant than a political organizer.

“I felt that I had to stand up for the LGBTQ+ community,” she said. “We all have the right to read the things we choose to read. I can’t imagine taking that away from any individual.”

A ‘manufactured crisis’

Iris Halpern, the attorney representing Lesley and Young, said these legal challenges should give county officials pause before retaliating against librarians for expressing their first amendment rights. Halpern said her firm has filed litigation on five wrongful termination cases and is actively monitoring three others. “We all hope it sends a message out that you should not discriminate against constituents you represent, that there will be ramifications if you break the law,” she said. In the first half of the year, state lawmakers introduced more than 130 bills to restrict access to library materials and impose harsh penalties on non-compliant librarians. The American Library Association recorded 821 attempts to ban library books and services in 2024 – the third-highest year on record. More than two-thirds of documented attempts were initiated by special interest groups and elected officials, the organization found.

“This has been indicative of censorship matters of the past 5 years,” said Sam Helmick, the president of ALA. “Despite 70% of Americans not wanting censorship in any way, we still have representatives who no longer trust the community to make those decisions for themselves and their families.” Books exploring race, sexual health and gender identity have faced an unprecedented level of challenges in recent years, as Republican-led states sought to codify censorship into law. Award-winning books such as Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me have all been caught in the crosshairs.

In public schools, the majority of banned books last year featured people of color, LGBTQ+ people and other demographics, according to a PEN America report. In Greenville county, South Carolina, a group of library patrons sued in March to block book restriction policies that purged at least 59 titles by or about LGBTQ+ people. The case is still pending in federal court. Halpern said the surge in book bans is a “manufactured crisis” fueled by national conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty and the National Federation of Republican Women. Local chapters of both organizations have challenged dozens of books in public and school libraries.

Jacob Ogles at The Advocate:

A Tennessee library board voted to fire its director Monday after she refused to remove more than 100 LGBTQ+ books from the system’s shelves, capping weeks of escalating tension over censorship, access, and reader privacy. The Rutherford County Library Board made the decision during a heated emergency meeting in Murfreesboro, where members entered executive session before returning for a brief public vote to oust Library Director Luanne James, according to local reports. James had argued that removing or relocating the books, many of them in children’s sections, would amount to political censorship. “I stand by my decision, and I am not going to change my mind,” James said during the meeting, according to Nashville Fox affiliate WZTV.

Her refusal has drawn national attention from free expression advocates, who say the case reflects a broader campaign to restrict access to LGBTQ+ materials in public libraries. “Tonight, Luanne James was voted out of her library director position for refusing to move LGBTQ+ books into the adult section,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program.

“With a firm: ‘I will not comply,’ Luanne demonstrated her deep commitment to the freedom to read and the principles of librarianship, at a steep cost,” Meehan said. “Her story will echo from the courthouse in Murfreesboro, Tenn., across the country as emblematic of the fight against censorship and suppression.”

Rutherford County Library System’s board fires hero librarian director Luanne James for rightly refusing to comply with an order to remove more than 100 LGBTQ+ books from the system’s shelves.

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Mike Hixenbaugh at NBC News:

METROPOLIS, Ill. — The pastor began his sermon with a warning. Satan was winning territory across America, and now he was coming for their small town on the banks of the Ohio River in southern Illinois. “Evil is moving and motivated,” Brian Anderson told his congregation at Eastland Life Church on the evening of Jan. 13. “And the church is asleep.” But there was still time to fight back, Anderson said. He called on the God-fearing people of Metropolis to meet the enemy where Satan was planning his assault: at their town’s library. A public meeting was scheduled there that Tuesday, and Christians needed to make their voices heard. Otherwise, Anderson said, the library would soon resemble a scene “straight out of Sodom and Gomorrah.” The pastor’s call to action three months ago helped ignite a bitter fight that some locals have described as “a battle for the soul” of Metropolis.

The dispute has pitted the city’s mayor, a member of Eastland Life Church, against his own library board of trustees. It led to the abrupt dismissal of the library director, who accused the board of punishing her for her faith. And last month, it drew scrutiny from the state’s Democratic secretary of state, who said the events in Metropolis “should frighten and insult all Americans who believe in the freedom of speech and in our democracy.” Similar conflicts have rocked towns and suburbs across the country, as some conservatives — convinced that Democrats want to "sexualize" and indoctrinate children — have sought to purge libraries of books featuring LGBTQ characters and storylines. Republican state legislatures have taken up a wave of bills making it easier to remove books and threatening librarians with criminal charges if they allow minors to access titles that include depictions of sex.

To counter this movement, Illinois Democrats last year adopted the first state law in the nation aimed at preventing book bans— which ended up feeding the unrest in Metropolis. Under the law, public libraries can receive state grant funding only if they adhere to the Library Bill of Rights, a set of policies long promoted by the American Library Association to prevent censorship.

Many longtime residents were stunned when these national fissures erupted in Metropolis, a quirky, conservative city of about 6,000 people that has a reputation for welcoming outsiders. Because of its shared name with the fictional city from DC Comics, Metropolis has for the past half century marketed itself as “Superman's hometown.” Tens of thousands of tourists stop off Interstate 24 each year to pose beneath a 15-foot Superman statue at the center of town, to attend the summertime Superman Celebration, or to browse one of the world’s largest collections of Superman paraphernalia at the Super Museum.

“Where heroes and history meet on the shores of the majestic Ohio River,” the visitor’s bureau beckons, “Metropolis offers the best small-town America has to offer.” But lately, the pages of the Metropolis Planet — yes, even the masthead of the local newspaper pays homage to Clark Kent — have been filled with strife. Unlike in comic books and the Bible, the fight in Metropolis doesn’t break along simple ideological lines. Virtually everyone on either side of the conflict identifies as a Christian, and most folks here vote Republican. The real divide is between residents who believe the public library should adhere to their personal religious convictions, and those who argue that it should instead reflect a wide range of ideas and identities.

During his sermon in January and in the months since, Anderson has cast his congregation and their God as righteous defenders of Metropolis — and the Library Bill of Rights and its supporters as forces of evil. If Christians didn’t take a stand, Anderson warned, there would soon be an entire children’s section at the library “dedicated to sexual immorality and perversion.” And before long, he said, the town would be hosting “story hour with some guy that thinks he’s a girl.”

[...] A week later, the board went into a closed session and presented Baxter with an ultimatum: If she wanted to keep her job, she needed to sign a performance improvement plan. It stipulated that she would abide by the Library Bill of Rights, seek state grant funding and discontinue praying aloud with children and other religious activities at the library. Baxter refused to sign and began to criticize the board. Voices were raised, according to three members. After a few minutes, James, the board president, slammed her fist on the table. “This is not up for debate, Rosemary,” she said. “Either sign it, or don’t.” Baxter stood up and left. Minutes later, the board came out of closed session. By a vote of 5-3, they terminated Baxter’s employment. Baxter’s departure left the library in turmoil. Four employees resigned soon after, and the board got to work picking up the pieces.  They brought on a former library employee to serve as interim director and embarked on top-to-bottom reviews of the library’s catalog and finances. “Our focus,” James said, “is making sure our library is strong and healthy and there to serve everyone.” Then, on March 19, the story of Baxter’s firing was picked up by Blaze Media, a national conservative outlet. In a column titled, “A librarian’s faithful service is silenced by a secularist takeover,” conservative talk radio host Steve Deace interviewed Baxter and Anderson and reported that both had come under fire for their Christian beliefs.

Deace presented the local saga as a warning that evil forces were now coming for small-town America and blamed the problems in Metropolis, in part, on “a California transplant who is living with another man,” referring to Loverin, the library board member. Three days later, Metropolis Mayor Don Canada — who in 2021 had appointed Anderson, his pastor, to an open seat on the City Council — took a stand of his own. In letters addressed to James and two other board members, Canada announced that he’d “lost faith in the Board in its current state.” As a result, he was removing James and two others who’d voted to terminate Baxter.