Thursday
Last October, Sewanee’s Friends of the Library, which I chair, held a “Banned Book Week” event where we invited author Christina Soontornvat and librarian Keri Lambert to discuss rightwing book banning attempts. Soontornvat is a founding member of Authors against Book Bans while Lambert is involved with the Rutherford County Library Alliance, which recently received the Tennessee Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Award.
Rutherford County, which is Tennessee’s third largest county and only an hour up the road from me, is again in the news, thanks to a heroic stance taken by its director. Luanne James is refusing to comply with her reactionary board’s 8-3 directive to relocate over a hundred LGBTQ+ children’s titles to the adult section. She has also revealed that the board chair made several private demands that were unethical and in some instances illegal, including obtaining personal data from library patrons and violating FOIA laws.
“Unhappy is the land that needs heroes,” Brecht has Galileo say in his play about the scientist, and our own unhappy times have led James to put her job on the line. Here’s her inspiring letter:
Good afternoon everyone.
As the Director of the Rutherford County Library System (RCLS), I am professionally and ethically bound to uphold the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Public libraries serve as vital repositories of diverse ideas, both popular and unpopular. 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. Our libraries are funded by and for the citizens; therefore, the right to access information—free from government interference—is a protected hallmark of our democracy.
The 8-3 vote by the Library Board on March 16th to relocate over 100+ LGBTQIA children’s titles to the adult section is a clear act of viewpoint discrimination. Furthermore, the vote to move the books was done without following the library’s established Request for Reconsideration policy.
My duty to protect public access is not merely a personal opinion; it is a core tenet of the American Library Association’s Code of Ethics. As an arm of the county government, the Board cannot legally limit the public’s access to materials owned by the people based on the content of the ideas expressed within them.
Therefore, I will not comply with the Board’s decision to relocate these books. Doing so would violate the First Amendment right of all citizens of Rutherford County and myself. Consequently, I would compromise my professional obligation to oppose government-mandated viewpoint discrimination.
I want you to know that I am more than willing to discuss this decision with members of the Board at any time. I trust you understand my position expressed in this letter. As the Director of RCLS, I must uphold the obligations owed to the citizens of Rutherford County, and in particular the duty owed by the public library to its patrons, to allow access to views expressed by authors to benefit the public’s right to read and access protected speech.
Sincerely,
Luanne James
I’ve been thinking about what I wrote in 2012 about heroism in How Beowulf Can Save America: An Epic Hero’s Guide to Defeating the Politics of Rage. In the years since, I’ve worried that, even though our monsters continue to operate as I described, what I wrote about heroism was overly optimistic. I wrote the book in the year leading up to Obama’s reelection to a second term, but if I’d foreseen Trump in our future, I perhaps would have replaced “defeating” with “resisting.” I underestimated the rightwing reaction to liberalism’s advances.
Nevertheless, what I had to say about the reserves that Boewulf draws on to defeat Grendel’s Mother is still relevant. As I explained on Friday, I see the troll as the archetype of destructive grieving and, as such, far more difficult to defeat than her son’s raging resentment. People can grieve over the death of an ideal as much as of an individual, and the grieving that we are witnessing amongst portions of America is over the death of white, patriarchal, heterosexual, Christian America, often associated with the 1950s. The rage burns so hot that people are willing to cheer the burn-it-all-down governance of Donald Trump, even when they themselves are victimized. We see such rage expressed in the Finn episode:
The wildness in them
had to brim over.
The hall ran red
with blood of enemies.
The anger against liberals, feminists, LGBTQIA folk, and others can appear daunting, threatening to swallow us up as Grendel’s Mother threatens to swallow up Beowulf in her underwater sea cave. He discovers, however, that he has resources within he didn’t know he had. In the poem, aid comes in the form of a giant sword dating back to the golden age before the flood. Luanne James, the citizens of Minnesota, and all those others resisting Trump’s grievance-driven authoritarianism have their own sword to turn to. As I write in my book,
Our higher ideal, expressed in The Declaration of Independence, is bigger than our individual grievances and will fortify us, just as, in his darkest moment, Beowulf’s great sword fortifies him. Those who came before, like the warrior giants who forged that weapon, can infuse us with their spirit and inspire us to push through our pain. Wielding the sword means acknowledging and claiming that we stand on the shoulders of those who have come before. We are fighting the good fight, one that the founding fathers began and that Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, Harvey Milk, and a host of others continued, each working to ensure that America honors its promise.
When James cites the First Amendment and declares that “the right to access information—free from government interference—is a protected hallmark of our democracy,” she is tapping into the power of the sword.
There’s another important element in this battle, however, which calls for communal rather than individual action. At the end of his life, Beowulf at first thinks he must go it alone against the latest monster and is in danger of yielding to dragon despair. He triumphs only after his nephew Wiglaf comes to his assistance.
Luanne James, we learn from the write-up on her, “felt more able to speak up in this way” thanks to the “fiercely proactive” Rutherford County Library Alliance. This Saturday, millions of Americans will experience the power of standing together as they protest Trump’s authoritarian rule in the third No Kings protest. As I write in my book,
Always we must remember that, while the battle seems daunting, it is less so when we work in concert with others. There are few activities more exhilarating than joining with a group of fellow citizens to build a better society. The dragon’s hoard has wealth sufficient for all of us if we marshal up the collective will to liberate it.
