Fahrenheit 451, Nicholasville Edition

Often the most powerful demonstration of the need for First Amendment protection comes from the least obvious examples. By protecting the rights of a group as despicable as Nazis to demonstrate in a public park in a heavily Jewish area of Chicago such as Skokie, Illinois, the free marketplace of ideas insured that those ideas that are without merit will be substantively rejected.

Of course, the First Amendment applies to governmental action. It states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

There is almost always a requirement of governmental action that applies to all constitutional limitations and to federal anti-discrimination laws. That is why a private group like Lexington’s Idle Hour Country Club, if it remains a truly private club, has a constitutional right to discriminate because of race.

Recent events in Nicholasville reported by Amy Wilson of the Lexington Herald-Leader are quite different from the usual need for First Amendment protections. In Nicholasville, the public’s protection under the First Amendment is required due to private censorship by an individual. Recently a library employee named Sharon Cook decided to censor the book choices of library patrons based solely on her own personal beliefs about what is in her personal opinion inappropriate for other private citizens to read. The facts identified in the article below also show that Cook misused her access rights as a library employee to find out the identity of a person wanting to read an individual book. Assuming that Cook meets the definition contained in KRS 522.010(1) for “Public Servant”, the misuse of the library’s records may also subject her to prosecution under KRS 522.020, which is the criminal statute pertaining to official misconduct. Of course, a theoretical violation of the criminal statutes does not mean Cook will ever face criminal responsibility for the acts.

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Excerpts from the Herald-Leader article:

NICHOLASVILLE — Sharon Cook is either a hero or a villain.
She is either due your thanks for doing everything in her power to protect children from obscenity or she is due your disdain for wantonly taking away the constitutional rights of the people of Jessamine County.
…
It all started in the fall of 2008, and she is still doing it. The proof is in her knapsack, in a bright yellow flexible file folder, hidden from prying eyes. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume IV: The Black Dossier. It has pink and yellow highlighter tags sticking out, marking the pages that contain explicit sexual content.
It is the Jessamine County Public Library’s copy, which she has checked out and not returned. She is being fined 10 cents a day for her breach of library contract — and for her moral stand.
She was, she says, simply appalled that a child could find a book that contained so many outright visually obscene graphics in the Jessamine library where she worked. So nine months ago, she challenged its right to be included in the collection, and when that failed, she simply checked it out herself.
In effect, she removed the book from circulation. She checked it out over and over and over with her library card until a patron of the library, unaware of the circumstances of the book, put a hold on it, asking to be the next in line to check it out.
When Cook went to renew The Black Dossier on Sept. 21, the computer would not allow it because of the hold. Cook used her employee privileges to find out that the patron desiring the book was an 11-year-old girl.
This would not do.
On Sept. 22, Cook told two of her colleagues at the library about her dilemma, and Beth Boisvert made a decision. She would take the book off hold, thus disallowing the child — or the child’s parents — ever to see the book.
On Sept. 23, both Cook and Boisvert were fired. They were told by library director Ron Critchfield the firings were a decision of the library board.
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It has become a question of what public libraries are enshrined to do, what role they are to play in monitoring children and whether they get to decide what people get to read.
What complicates this is that the graphic novel in question meets no standard of obscenity by the law.
While it does contain many images of varied and explicit sexual behavior, it has been the subject of academic study. It was named by Time Magazine as one of its Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2007 and called “genius,” applauded for its ability to “pluck out the strange and angry and contradictory bits that underlie so much of the culture we live and think with today.”
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(The book had been bought originally because a patron had requested it.)
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Boisvert said she wanted them to know that “because we are a conservative community, we will choose to have our children protected.”
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The Jessamine library had, before any complaint, adopted the American Library Association’s policy manual and code of ethics as its own. (It is also the policy and code of ethics adopted by the state library association.)
It states: “Expurgation of any parts of books or other library resources by the library, its agent, or its parent institution is a violation of the Library Bill of Rights because it denies access to the complete work, and, therefore, to the entire spectrum of ideas that the work was intended to express.”
Further, in the ALA’s Code of Ethics: “We distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representations of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources.”
Critchfield has made a form of public comment: an open letter in the Jessamine Journal. In part, he wrote:
“As customers of a public library there is a First Amendment expectation to respect the rights of all persons — what one person might view as questionable might be quite important and relevant to another.”
As to the charge about Cook’s concern that the library was in violation of the state obscenity laws?
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Cook and Boisvert do not pretend to be librarians. Cook was a full-time employee of the library for four years before her firing. Boisvert worked 11 hours a week for more than two years before she was let go. Both women live in Jessamine County.
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Cook then went through the proper procedure of challenging the book, something any patron can do. That required a committee, including Cook, to read the book.
“People prayed over me while I was reading it because I did not want those images in my head,” she says.
The book was off the shelf for months while the committee reviewed it.
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Cook says that she never wanted the book taken off the shelves so adults couldn’t see it.
“I’m an adult. I do not want you telling me what I can read,” she says adamantly when you ask.
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Earlene Arnett, director of the Scott County Public Library, explains that “libraries take censorship very seriously. We also take the parent’s role very seriously. I’m sure they don’t want me to make their decisions for them.”
Arnett says that the Scott County library places graphic novels in the teen collection. “They are selected with the teen in mind,” she says.
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Critchfield would not comment on the terminations because they are personnel matters. According to the Employee Manual, grounds for dismissal can include insubordination, theft or misuse of the Jessamine library’s property, breach of confidentiality information and any other violation of library policy.
At this point, Cook and Boisvert have not hired an attorney. They are not sure if they want their jobs back. They do, however, want their reputations back. Both say they have never been fired before.
On Nov. 4, a special meeting of the Jessamine library board was called to set procedures for taking public comment. On Nov. 18, at 3:30 p.m., the community will have its opportunity to speak.

[End of article excerpts]

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Actually, the article is incorrect by stating that “It has become a question of what public libraries are enshrined to do, what role they are to play in monitoring children and whether they get to decide what people get to read.” In fact, the issue here is much simpler, and much easier. This presents a question of whether an individual person such as Cook, based on her own personal beliefs about right and wrong, can dictate what other private individuals may be allowed to read.

Recall also that Cook also said people prayed over her while she read it. Her personal religious beliefs are part of her basis for actions as a private citizen to deny other citizens access to a book.

Ironically, if Cook had proceeded with her concerns through public library meeetings, then her First Amendment rights would have insured that her employment would have been protected. Instead, she chose to violate the trust of library book readers, and chose to insert her own personal moral beliefs on the library’s users. And she chose to violate that trust for a novel which admittedly meets no standard of obscenity by the law. Such conduct is inconsistent with American beliefs that no individual can dictate standards to another about which ideas are acceptable based their own personal value system.

What will be interesting to see is whether all the tea-baggers who purport to be libertarians come out in an unholy alliance with the fundamentalist Christians on November 18, and seek to in effect have the library approve of Cook’s figurative book-burning.

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