When Missouri’s House voted in late March to approve a state budget that would eliminate $4.5 million in funding for public libraries, local and national free speech advocates went into panic mode.
The Missouri Senate later restored the funding to the budget proposal in April. But full funding for the state’s libraries is still not guaranteed and librarians and patrons are concerned that libraries across the state are still under attack and subject to the whims of Republican lawmakers.
Nor is the threat unique to Missouri. While threats to defund or eliminate public libraries are still relatively uncommon, they’re on the rise. Lawmakers in Llano County, Texas, weighed closing public libraries this spring instead of following a court order to return banned books to the shelves. They finally backed down after community members protested. Last fall, voters in Michigan rejected funding for the Patmos Library in Jamestown Charter Township after librarians refused to ban the book Gender Queer: A Memoir, a graphic novel about the author’s journey with gender identity. Other states, including Louisiana, Iowa, Indiana, and Tennessee, have seen similar challenges to libraries.
In Missouri, the state’s spending proposals are now before the legislature’s joint committee, where negotiations have reached an impasse ahead of Friday’s budget deadline.
“Having free access to information is important in a democracy, so it has frightened a lot of people that our state would want to make that more difficult,” said Otter Bowman, the president of the Missouri Library Association and a staffer at the Daniel Boone Regional Library in Columbia, Missouri. “It’s disturbing that the House’s decision to defund our libraries has become this political message. It discounts the needs of library patrons all over the state. It’s a real concern that they took so lightly.”
And as fights over banning books or removing them from shelves continue, libraries could be…
Read the full article here
