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James LaRue is almost right. It's a good idea, as a library, to not let small groups of people push you around and stop you from putting on programs that are in accord with your library's mission and that help represent your communities. (No points to anyone who bans LGBTQ displays because of a misguided belief that the people you want to court are those that want to deny the existence of LGBTQ people in your community. Or that neutrality means you have to respect the viewpoints of people who want others dead or unable to be themselves fully and the people who already exist and should be recognized as people.) Because, as we find, the community will come out to support those programs. And so, if a group wants to sue your library over programs that are part of your mission and that help represent your community, you let the lawyers out to play on this one. And if you're feeling charitable, you let the lawyers smile. In that same way, you fight back when it looks like a public official is trying to get you to close down political events in your library because they're being held by his opponent.
But when it comes to public or personal safety, it's no longer just the library as an organization that gets to make the call about what gets done. For example, while I might believe that the current crop of printers would not be able to produce guns that could be fired effectively, I can see why a library might discontinue 3D printing programs over the concern they might be used to print gun components. I also think that unless there's unsupervised access to the printers and they can be monopolized for significant amounts of time, there's very little risk of someone successfully printing all of their parts without someone noticing, but again, I can see the reasoning behind it all. After all, I only have to be wrong once for it to become a tragedy.
On the matter of this administrator, as soon as "A mom mentioned casually that she knew where the director lived. In the moment it was hard to tell if that was small town friendliness or almost-threat.", we've crossed the line from people objecting to the library and having a discussion about programming to the very real potential of threats, doxxing, harassment, and violence. Assuming that LaRue has used the correct pronouns for the library administrator in question, she now has to consider her own personal safety and whether the library's position is one she's willing to risk personal harm for. Because while LaRue describes the concerned people as "a group of moms," anyone who's been the target of a focused harrassment campaign understand that looks can be deceiving, and that plenty of seemignly ordinary people turn evil and vicious when they think they're going after an acceptable target. And given that the group of moms said a drag queen story time was about "the promotion of sexual deviance, and thus inappropriate for preschool and elementary school students.", I don't think that it would have been just a group of moms if they decided to escalate. The director is new on her job, and thus doesn't have, say, the experience of ten years of knowing that Betty and her friends object to everything, call about it, but don't do anything more than that about it.
Given all the news around about how the government wants to strip all protections away from trans people, terrorists mailing explosives to people that the current administrator has inveighed against, and lots of mass shootings in the past few years specifically about doing violence to others based on their beliefs about what's appropriate or not, it's potentially a lethal misstep to assume that a group of moms aren't going to do anything, even after they've threatened that they know where the administrator lives. It's not mentioned if the administrator has children, who could become acceptable targets at school over this, even if the administrator herself suffers no consequences. Or whether or not the administrator's church might use the pulpit to call her out for her decision every single week. Or whether the administrator might be subjected to a suite of microaggressions or a whisper campaign, or vandalism, or any other such things by the town over her decisions, creating a very hostile environment to live in.
So in an ordinary situation, where someone is hollering about programming, and maybe they plan to picket the library if you don't give in to them, it would set a bad precedent to give in to their demands and go against your own policy about what programming you will or won't bring. And that would make the staff and the queer community trust you less, because you caved in to a reactionary group simply because they were loud.
I'd bet, though, that if that administrator mentioned the comments that had been directed at her, and that she had to make a hard call about her own safety, and the safety of the staff, the staff would be much more forgiving, and the queer community would probably understand, even if they weren't happy about it. It's tough being out in a community where you know there are people who will thunder at you about "sexual deviance" and that you're "indoctrinating" children into your lifestyle.
Sometimes events might get postponed due to safety concerns. Or canceled. And those are smart decisions to make, in a world not composed of absolutes like the one James LaRue inhabits (at least for this blog post.) The linked Q and A about controversial programs at least acknowledges that credible threats of safety at events are worth taking seriously, but it still assumes that a threat has to rise to the level of credible (after consultation with law enforcement) before the library needs to take any action on it. I have a sneaking suspicion that a group of moms wouldn't rise to the level of credible threat until they had already started harassment campaigns, and even then wouldn't necessarily be taken seriously until law enfocement felt it proven to their satisfaction that something credible was going on - if the local law enforcement is on the side of the moms, good fucking luck getting them to respond seriously to organized campaigns.
James LaRue gets it right for situations where an administrator can be reasonably sure the arguments and protests will be directed at the library - stand on your policies, say thank you for the comments, remind them that library programs are not compulsory, and then do the thing that you and your staff have researched and decided is a good thing to do anyway. But it's entirely wrong to claim this as an absolute solution when there's a suspicion things might cross from the professional to the personal. If someone wants to take on that risk, that's their right, and nobody else's, no matter how much an OIF director might want to downplay that risk.
But when it comes to public or personal safety, it's no longer just the library as an organization that gets to make the call about what gets done. For example, while I might believe that the current crop of printers would not be able to produce guns that could be fired effectively, I can see why a library might discontinue 3D printing programs over the concern they might be used to print gun components. I also think that unless there's unsupervised access to the printers and they can be monopolized for significant amounts of time, there's very little risk of someone successfully printing all of their parts without someone noticing, but again, I can see the reasoning behind it all. After all, I only have to be wrong once for it to become a tragedy.
On the matter of this administrator, as soon as "A mom mentioned casually that she knew where the director lived. In the moment it was hard to tell if that was small town friendliness or almost-threat.", we've crossed the line from people objecting to the library and having a discussion about programming to the very real potential of threats, doxxing, harassment, and violence. Assuming that LaRue has used the correct pronouns for the library administrator in question, she now has to consider her own personal safety and whether the library's position is one she's willing to risk personal harm for. Because while LaRue describes the concerned people as "a group of moms," anyone who's been the target of a focused harrassment campaign understand that looks can be deceiving, and that plenty of seemignly ordinary people turn evil and vicious when they think they're going after an acceptable target. And given that the group of moms said a drag queen story time was about "the promotion of sexual deviance, and thus inappropriate for preschool and elementary school students.", I don't think that it would have been just a group of moms if they decided to escalate. The director is new on her job, and thus doesn't have, say, the experience of ten years of knowing that Betty and her friends object to everything, call about it, but don't do anything more than that about it.
Given all the news around about how the government wants to strip all protections away from trans people, terrorists mailing explosives to people that the current administrator has inveighed against, and lots of mass shootings in the past few years specifically about doing violence to others based on their beliefs about what's appropriate or not, it's potentially a lethal misstep to assume that a group of moms aren't going to do anything, even after they've threatened that they know where the administrator lives. It's not mentioned if the administrator has children, who could become acceptable targets at school over this, even if the administrator herself suffers no consequences. Or whether or not the administrator's church might use the pulpit to call her out for her decision every single week. Or whether the administrator might be subjected to a suite of microaggressions or a whisper campaign, or vandalism, or any other such things by the town over her decisions, creating a very hostile environment to live in.
So in an ordinary situation, where someone is hollering about programming, and maybe they plan to picket the library if you don't give in to them, it would set a bad precedent to give in to their demands and go against your own policy about what programming you will or won't bring. And that would make the staff and the queer community trust you less, because you caved in to a reactionary group simply because they were loud.
I'd bet, though, that if that administrator mentioned the comments that had been directed at her, and that she had to make a hard call about her own safety, and the safety of the staff, the staff would be much more forgiving, and the queer community would probably understand, even if they weren't happy about it. It's tough being out in a community where you know there are people who will thunder at you about "sexual deviance" and that you're "indoctrinating" children into your lifestyle.
Sometimes events might get postponed due to safety concerns. Or canceled. And those are smart decisions to make, in a world not composed of absolutes like the one James LaRue inhabits (at least for this blog post.) The linked Q and A about controversial programs at least acknowledges that credible threats of safety at events are worth taking seriously, but it still assumes that a threat has to rise to the level of credible (after consultation with law enforcement) before the library needs to take any action on it. I have a sneaking suspicion that a group of moms wouldn't rise to the level of credible threat until they had already started harassment campaigns, and even then wouldn't necessarily be taken seriously until law enfocement felt it proven to their satisfaction that something credible was going on - if the local law enforcement is on the side of the moms, good fucking luck getting them to respond seriously to organized campaigns.
James LaRue gets it right for situations where an administrator can be reasonably sure the arguments and protests will be directed at the library - stand on your policies, say thank you for the comments, remind them that library programs are not compulsory, and then do the thing that you and your staff have researched and decided is a good thing to do anyway. But it's entirely wrong to claim this as an absolute solution when there's a suspicion things might cross from the professional to the personal. If someone wants to take on that risk, that's their right, and nobody else's, no matter how much an OIF director might want to downplay that risk.
