Bryan Clark: Tired of fighting over book bans? An Idaho library has one possible solution

About two weeks ago, the Idaho Falls Public Library rescinded all library cards for children, as the Post Register reported. It was the first step in a new policy aimed at giving parents more control over what their children read.

There are now two kinds of library cards for children: restricted cards, which allow them to check out books only from the children’s section, and unrestricted cards, which enable them to check out anything apart from movies and graphic novels in the adult section.

A similar policy was recently adopted by the Community Library Network, which serves a range of smaller towns in North Idaho.

The adoption of these policies demonstrates clearly that there is no need for the Legislature to continue with efforts to crack down on public libraries, exemplified by last year’s House Bill 314, which would have become law had Gov. Brad Little not vetoed it. Library boards throughout the state are already responsive to local interests and preferences.

“I am a firm believer that government that is closer to the people works better, and you don’t have any government closer,” Idaho Falls Public Library Director Richard Wright said in an interview.

“Each community should be able to make their own choices,” he said.

For the past two years, library workers across Idaho have been subject not only to intense scrutiny by the Legislature, but relentless attacks from small groups of censorship advocates in local communities.

As the Post Register reported, the efforts to ban books in Idaho Falls were pushed by the poorly named Idaho Parents for Educational Choice. According to the group’s website, it has worked alongside local John Birch Society groups and has taken guidance from the Christian nationalist Idaho Family Policy Center.

Now that the policy has been adopted, the preferences of the broader community of parents are starting to reveal themselves.

The library system previously had about 7,500 children’s library cards issued. After about two weeks under the new policy, about 1,900 – likely a mixture of the heaviest library users and the children of those most interested in library restrictions – had applied for new cards. Roughly three-quarters of those opted for the full-access card, and only about a quarter chose the restricted card.

Since those who were pushing for restrictions likely applied for new restricted cards in a rush, I’d expect the proportion of restricted cards to fall as more of the new cards are issued. That’s already the apparent trend: when the Post Register reported the new policy about a week ago, the split was roughly 50/50, and now it’s 75/25.

There’s a lesson for Idaho politicians here: The forces of censorship are loud, drowning out the perspectives of the much more reasonable majority with the intensity of their vitriol. But they are, in fact, a tiny fraction of the population.

The overwhelming majority of parents want their kids to have full access to the library, to freely and critically explore a wide variety of ideas, most of which they will reject, as kids across the country have done for well over a century.

Wright hopes the move will end attacks on library workers coming from some lawmakers and small groups of censorship advocates.

“We’ve had board meetings where people have come in and accused people of sex trafficking and opening up kids to abuse and drug use,” Wright said. “It’s very demoralizing. It’s very hard to deal with. Nobody wants to be called a pedophile simply because you have books on the shelf that describe human reproduction.”

The way Idaho has treated public servants dedicated to providing free access to information over the past few years has been utterly shameful. I hope we can leave that nonsense in the past, with so many libraries bending over backward to accommodate the small groups who have been leading attacks on them.

Because with policies like these, parents with objections to books in the library have all the tools they need to decide what their kids will read, instead of trying to change the laws so that they can dictate what all kids will read.

“The library doesn’t know how mature your child is or what your family’s values are,” Wright said. “If a certain book lies outside your family values, then you should probably not have your child read it.”

Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman based in Eastern Idaho.