|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The last time Ray Boles spoke to APR, he complained about an opinion piece that had run on the anti-LGBTQ media site 1819 News.
“These people are driving me insane writing all these articles from this Read Freely bunch—not the Read Freely, the Clean Up Prattville,” said Boles, chair of the Autauga-Prattville Public Library board. “And I’m like ‘Hey, y’all don’t need to be printing this because it’s a bunch of lies.’ … There’s an article they wrote—they didn’t write it, it’s an opinion piece that somebody wrote that ticked me off—and I was calling them telling them they don’t need to be running opinion pieces unless they call me and ask me about it.”
The opinion column that had “ticked (Boles) off” was penned by Lori Herring, special projects coordinator for Eagle Forum of Alabama and–as of last week—a library associate at the Prattville library.
In that same column and elsewhere, Herring has said that Clean Up Alabama is actually a joint effort of Clean Up Prattville and Eagle Forum.
“Eagle Forum of Alabama is grateful to these brave parents and citizens for standing up to those trying to groom our children, spoil their innocence, and make the difficult job of parenting even more difficult,” Herring wrote. “We have partnered with Clean Up Prattville to form Clean Up Alabama, forming groups across the state to examine their local libraries.”
Despite Boles’ apparent beef with Herring’s “bunch of lies,” patrons have now observed her to be an employee working at the main branch of the Prattville library, working the circulation desk.
The library is in dire need of employees, now down to eight in all with three of those employees responsible for keeping the system’s satellite branches running and two of the other employees barely working in the main branch.
Members of Clean Up Alabama, including executive director Hannah Rees and APPL board attorney Laura Clark, had previously been observed running programs at the library as volunteers.
Herring now works alongside librarians that her organization has consistently painted as “groomers” providing “pornographic” material to children.
After a Facebook commenter challenged Herring to name a pornographic book in the children or young adult section of the library, Herring responded with “Nick and Charlie.” There is one passage in the book that alludes to sex between two boys, although it does not describe it in any explicit detail.
Even after controversy erupted following the termination of director Andrew Foster, the library has continued to fire employees for talking to media, specifically APR. The library fired assistant director Kaitlin Wilson last week after reprimanding her for speaking to APR and then questioning Wilson about speaking to the media.
