OPINION
I believe my county’s librar y system is violating the Constitutional right to access information by erasing LGBTQ+ voices
IT WASN’T A TYPICAL DAY—JULY 1, 2023, was the day Ordinance 23-0-22, better known as the “Decency Ordinance,” was set to go into effect in M u rfreesboro, Tennessee.
It gave Police Chief Michael Bowen and City Manager Craig Tindall the power to penalize anyone, anywhere in public, for anything they deemed indecent. No two men should have this much power.
When questioned on what would qualify as indecent during public discussions before Murfreesboro City Council voted to pass the ordinance, the response was: I can tell you when I see it.
I believe that this was an absurd and dangerous attempt to criminalize being LGBTQ+ in our town, a discriminatory effort that coincided with a similar attempt to erase Murfreesboro’s LGBTQ+ citizens and their stories at the Rutherford County Library System (RCLS).
Fortunately, with the bad came some good—a community ready to defend and protect everyone’s rights to be themselves and be welcome.
I quickly signed a petition against censorship created on Facebook by Matt and Tiffany Fee, two concerned Rutherford County residents, also instrumental in the formation of The Rutherford County Library Alliance (RCLA) Facebook group.
I became an active member and now serve as vice president. We started preparing to appear at the August 28 library board meeting where the board of directors would decide the fate of six books one library patron had challenged.
It was standing room only. What I witnessed that day was disturbing: Board members laughing as they were unable to correctly say “LGBTQ+,” cherry-picking sentences from some of the targeted books, and taking them out of context.
They also showed a lack of understanding of how the Miller test works, the longstanding historic legal test for determining whether expression constitutes obscenity. They tried to gaslight, unconvincingly, that it was “just a coincidence that all the books were LGBTQ+.”
Most horrifyingly of all, a board member demanded from library staff the name of the person responsible for allowing the books to be on the shelves in what felt to me like an attempt to intimidate.
Four of those books would go on to be banned—two against library staffs’ advice, the other two removed from the Young Adult section on staff recommendations.
After that meeting, I knew we needed to fight. Librarians were under intimidating pressure from their own board while the local government was censoring our community’s access to information—I believe in violation of the Constitution.
To say I was shocked and frustrated would be an understatement. I could not understand how this could be happening in the United States
