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.