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Clean Up Alabama has the Fairhope Library in its sights, complaining to city leaders that board chair Anne Johnson has supported decisions to keep two books in the youth sections that they say violate policy.
The group circulated an email to followers last week asking them to sign a petition supporting their position and including a link to draft a pre-written email to Fairhope city councilors calling for Johnson’s resignation and the withholding of $225,000 in library funding until the books are removed.
The books that stirred up the drastic action are “Parts and Hearts” and “Grown.”
“Parts and Hearts” is a book designed for children to understand the transitioning process for transgender individuals. It contains a few cartoon illustrations of nudity featuring very little detail, including an individual with breasts and a penis.
“She claims that Parts and Hearts by Jensen Hillenbrand, a book that perpetuates lies to boys and girls by telling them they will wake up happy after choosing to mutilate themselves via surgery, is ‘educational,'” Clean Up Alabama said in its email to followers. “This book teaches children how to transition genders and includes instructions on taking hormones and undergoing surgery.”
It is currently not legal for minors to take puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones or have gender-affirming surgery in Alabama, although no such surgeries were ever being performed on minors in the state. That law has been challenged in court and is awaiting trial after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower federal judge’s injunction halting the law.
“Grown” tells the story of a 17-year-old girl who wants to become a singer and collides with an older male R&B and hip hop star who grooms her into a sexually abusive state.
Johnson told the group in an email that the board’s decision to leave “Grown” in the young adult section would stand for five years, per the library’s policies.
“By the way, I have read ‘Grown’ and have no problem supporting the library’s decision,” Johnson said. “The book is entirely appropriate for a teen audience.”
The Fairhope library has already revised its policies and confirmed with the Alabama Public Library Service that those policies meet the new requirements to receive state aid.
But Clean Up Alabama says keeping these two books in the juvenile and young adult sections goes against the code’s intent to keep sexually explicit and other inappropriate materials out of sections for minors.
“In their justification, the Fairhope library asserts that the APLS board granted the exemption of educational materials,” Clean Up Alabama said in its email. “Even if the dubious claim of Parts and Hearts being educational were true, no such exemption exists in the current APLS guidelines. The exemption in the code is ONLY for religious, history, anatomy and biology texts. These books fall outside of those categories.”
While APLS has authority to require certain policies be in place to receive state aid, they do not currently have authority to oversee how libraries apply those policies to their collections.
Under the current Fairhope Library policies, approved by APLS, an exemption is given for the purchase and placement of sexually explicit materials that are “age-appropriate” that have “religious, literary, artistic or scientific value.”
Beyond that, Johnson told APR that “Grown” is not “particularly graphic.”
“There is a mention of fondling and oral sex, but not an actual description of it,” Johnson said.
One scene depicts the protagonist being sexually assaulted by the singer, but with sparse detail of anything sexual that is happening.
The only thing that could qualify as sexually explicit in Parts and Hearts is the cartoon images of nudity, which are presented anatomically and not sexually.
The Fairhope City Council met last week after the emails began circulating, but did not address them at that time. No members of the public came up to speak about the situation.
