The right-leaning group Parents Defending Education (PDE) has sued the Linn-Mar Community School District of Iowa because its policies protect transgender students from transphobic parents and students. PDE supports banning LGBTQ books and curricula about institutional racism from schools. The organization has also previously partnered with the anti-LGBTQ group Moms for Liberty.
The Linn-Mar Community School District allows students (grades seven and up) to create a “gender support plan.” The plan requires school staff, students, and school documents (including ID cards and yearbooks) to address students by their self-assigned name and gender identity. The policy also allows these students to enter the locker room, bathroom facilities, and sports teams matching their gender identities.
PDE’s lawsuit takes particular issue with part of the policy that withholds details of a student’s gender support plan from a student’s parents, even if they specifically request it. The lawsuit also says that because parents are notified by the school about “lesser matters” like “schoolyard tussles, missing homework, and social events,” the school should notify parents about a kid’s gender identity, otherwise parents won’t be able to properly support their kid.
The lawsuit omits the fact that nearly 50 percent of trans people in the U.S. experienced familial rejection for coming out as trans, something which dramatically increases their likelihood of attempting suicide, becoming addicted to drugs, or experiencing homelessness, according to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.
“Parents are completely and purposefully left in the dark. The Policy plainly violates parents’ rights under the Fourteenth Amendment,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit also claims that the district’s policies against transphobic speech – like deadnaming and misgendering – are a violation of students’ First Amendment free speech protections because the policies punish them for “expressing their sincerely held beliefs about biological sex.” The lawsuit omits the fact that misgendering is a form of anti-trans harassment banned by most social media platforms.
“Nearly a century of Supreme Court precedent makes two things clear: parents have a constitutional liberty interest in the care, custody, and control of their children, and students do not abandon their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit’s true biases become apparent, however, in a section describing the complaining parents being represented by PDE.
One of the parents has a middle-school-aged child on the autism spectrum and worries that their kid’s “difficulty distinguishing between male and female characteristics” will get them placed on a gender support plan, pressuring them to identify as trans or nonbinary even though the child may not have a firm grasp of what these identities entail.
Another parent mentioned in the lawsuit worries that their “extremely impressionable” daughter will follow the lead of LGBTQ-affirming teachers and queer classmates and start identifying as trans or nonbinary.
“Some of Parent B’s daughter’s special-needs classes are held in a classroom that also functions as the meeting location for the LGBT student club,” the lawsuit says. “The teacher in that classroom is the faculty advisor for the club. Thus, the classroom walls contain several posters with information about various gender identities, gender ‘social transitions,’ and ‘referred pronouns.’ Parent B’s daughter is extremely impressionable and often follows the lead of other students.”
The lawsuit mentions “research” showing that more teens are identifying as trans due to peer pressure, but it doesn’t actually mention which research it’s referring to. A recent study suggested that worries like this are completely unfounded.
Two other parents represented by PDE say they basically want their kids to be able to misgender and openly disagree with the gender identities of trans kids without facing any consequences. Yet another parent said they didn’t want their kid to be exposed to the acknowledgment of trans people because it will cause the parent “emotional and psychological suffering.”
The lawsuit seeks to block the district’s Gender Support Plan from going into effect, essentially eliminating the district’s support of trans youth, something that will worsen mental health outcomes for trans students in the name of “free speech” and constitutional freedoms.
As monkeypox continues to spread worldwide, health officials have recommended high-risk individuals get vaccinated as soon as possible—but research is limited on just how effectively the available vaccines prevent infection, Randy Dotinga writes for MedPage Today.
CDC has confirmed 6,326 cases of monkeypox across 48 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The states most impacted by the outbreak so far are New York with 1,617 cases, California with 826 cases, and Illinois with 533 cases.
To reduce the risk of viral transmission, health officials have recommended high-risk individuals be vaccinated against monkeypox. So far, the United States has purchased 7 million doses of Bavarian Nordic‘s Jynneos vaccine, the preferred vaccine against monkeypox, and the entire supply is expected to be available by mid-2023.
So far, the supply of vaccines has been limited, with many jurisdictions, including San Francisco and New York City, saying that they do not have enough to meet demand. Last week, FDA announced it had cleared an additional 786,000 vaccine doses for use.
How well does the monkeypox vaccine actually work?
While health officials continue to emphasize the value of vaccination, there is limited evidence to show that the monkeypox vaccine is effective at preventing infection from the virus. CDC has acknowledged that “no data are available yet on the effectiveness of these vaccines in the current outbreak.”
According to Jay Varma, director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response, “It is absolutely critical that public health officials work on messaging this uncertainty to people about being vaccinated.”
So far, much of the data on the monkeypox vaccine is from a retrospective analysis published in 1988, which examined whether a smallpox vaccine could also prevent monkeypox. In the study, researchers followed household contacts of 209 people in Zaire who had been infected with monkeypox and found that those who had scars from prior smallpox vaccination were 85% less likely to be infected.
According to Ira Longini, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, the study’s conclusions are limited, since its statistical analysis has no reported confidence interval and did not adjust for other factors, such as age. In addition, the data was based solely on physical signs of vaccination.
The study “is the only shred of evidence we have (in regard to vaccine effectiveness), which is pretty weak,” he said. “In principle it should work, but we don’t know.”
Richard Kennedy, co-director of the Mayo Vaccine Research Group, agreed, saying that the Jynneos vaccine and an older smallpox vaccine ACAM2000 “have not been tested directly against smallpox or monkeypox” and that “[t]he immune responses they create are very close to first- or second-generation vaccines: A little weaker, but not much.”
However, Kennedy noted that the vaccines have been tested against monkeypox in several animal studies. “These data are also clear and consistent with very good protection against disease with animals showing very few or no symptoms of illness after challenge,” he said. “The animal data was strong enough that the FDA approved Jynneos to be licensed for prevention of monkeypox.”
How can people protect themselves against monkeypox?
In addition to vaccination, health officials have advised those who are most at risk, particularly men who have sex with men (MSM), to take steps to reduce their risk of infection, including adjusting their sexual behavior during the current outbreak.
For example, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last week recommended “reducing your number of sexual partners, reconsidering … sex with new partners, and exchanging contact details with any new partners to enable follow up if needed.”
Similarly, CDC offered advice for lowering the potential risk of infection during sex, including not kissing and avoiding sharing towels and other items.
“The prevention messaging should be that vaccinations will be an essential part of getting this outbreak under control, and we need everyone to get vaccinated as soon as possible,” said Michael Donnelly, a data scientist and LGBT health advocate. “But even if you’re vaccinated, you’re still at risk, and unprotected anal sex may be the highest risk.”
“Even after vaccination, you may want to consider reducing the number of your sex partners and using condoms or pursuing other safer sex approaches,” he added. (Dotinga, MedPage Today, 8/1)
Southern Decadence, advertised as the largest LGBTQ+ festival held annually in the Deep South, is scheduled for Labor Day weekend (Sept. 1-5) in New Orleans. It typically attracts 100,000 to 300,000 participants and is a major economic boon to the city in a season when tourism is otherwise sluggish. Health officials at the state and local level say Louisiana’s meager vaccine supply will leave the state vulnerable to a large monkeypox outbreak following such a massive event.
Southern Decadence could also further the virus spread in other parts of the country if visitors become infected while in New Orleans and carry monkeypox back to their hometowns, they said. “This will be a superspreader event without additional vaccine doses ahead of time to get as many people as possible [vaccinated],” said Jennifer Avegno, New Orleans health director and an emergency room physician, in an interview this week.
On Thursday, the Human Rights Campaign filed the lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the child, identified as D.H., and her parents.
Under the 2021 law, which allows cisgender public school students and their families to sue if they’re not given a “reasonable accommodation” by their school if they don’t want to share bathrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities with trans people, D.H. was forced to use single-occupancy restrooms at school.
According to the lawsuit, D.H. stopped using school restrooms entirely and began limiting her food and water intake to minimize her need to use school facilities. She also developed migraines, reflux, and recurring nightmares of school.
“These restroom ‘accommodations’ provided to D.H. by the elementary school are not accommodations at all,” according to the complaint. “They reinforce the differential treatment and trauma associated with living under the [Accommodations for All Children Act], violating D.H.’s constitutional and statutory rights.”
The suit argues that the Tennessee law, signed by Gov. Bill Lee (R) in 2021, violates D.H.’s constitutional rights under the Equal Protection Clause and violates Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education. In June, the Biden Administration announced changes to the legal interpretation of Title IX which would help prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Last month, a federal judge blocked the Education Department’s new guidance.
“It is unfortunate that Tennessee lawmakers are using their authority to attack some of our nation’s most vulnerable: our children,” said HRC litigation director Cynthia Cheng-Wun Weaver.
“Years ago, I chose to move to Tennessee because it was known as ‘the Volunteer State,’ whose citizens cared for their neighbors without hesitation – not a state that legalizes discrimination against helpless children,” D.H.’s mother said in a statement. “Now I am embarrassed to say that I live in a state that refuses to see anything beyond my child’s gender.”
“By filing this lawsuit, I am showing my volunteer spirit – because I’m fighting to not only affirm my child’s existence, but also the thousands of transgender and nonbinary children who live in Tennessee.”
This is the second lawsuit the HRC has filed against the Tennessee law on behalf of a transgender child. A previous suit, filed last year, was dismissed after the plaintiffs chose to leave the state.
A Washington, D.C., gay couple was attacked on Sunday by a pair of teenagers who reportedly called them “monkeypox f****ts.”
The couple says they were walking in the Shaw neighborhood when they encountered a group of teens who began calling them “monkeypox f****ts.” According to Metro Weekly, Robert, 25, and Antonio, 23, were followed down the street by one of the teens. When Robert turned to confront him, the teen punched him in the forehead, knocking him to the ground.
A second teen then punched Antonio in the face. The first teen struck Robert again, breaking his glasses. An onlooker called the police, and most of the teens fled. However, two young women who had been with the group approached Robert and Antonio to apologize.
“One of them said their dad was gay and it was messed up that they attacked us. But I was still pretty pissed at the whole incident, so I let them pass,” Robert said.
Police took the couple to the emergency room at Howard University Hospital, where they remained for six hours to ensure they didn’t have concussions. Antonio also received stitches to his upper lip.
“I mainly feel shock that this could happen in D.C. in broad daylight, only three or four blocks from U Street, walking from a gay bar to public transit,” said Robert.
“I’ve actually had more experiences of homophobia the past couple of months than I have ever before, just this summer alone,” he continued. “A few months ago, a friend of mine and I were on the Metro coming home on the Red Line from a pool party. And some guy told us not to—he just said some homophobic things to us, saying that where he was from, they ‘kill gay people’ or something along those lines.”
“And then even as we were walking down 7th Street, just minutes before, someone shook his head at us and said, ‘That ain’t right,’ which I think was a reference to what Antonio was wearing, which was just a crop top. So yeah, it’s just kind of crazy that it seems like there’s been way more homophobia than I’ve experienced before, even growing up in Texas.”
“There is more overt homophobia here,” added Antonio, who has lived in D.C. since 2020. “There are more altercations on the street or verbal comments from random people versus at home.”
A small-town library is at risk of shutting down after residents of Jamestown, Michigan, voted to defund it rather than tolerate certain LGBTQ+-themed books. Residents voted on Tuesday to block a renewal of funds tied to property taxes, Bridge Michigan reported.
The vote leaves the library with funds through the first quarter of next year. Once a reserve fund is used up, it would be forced to close, Larry Walton, the library board’s president, told Bridge Michigan – harming not just readers but the community at large.
Beyond books, residents visit the library for its wifi, he said, and it houses the very room where the vote took place. The library’s refusal to submit to the demands led to a campaign urging residents to vote against renewed funding for the library.
Ugandan authorities have suspended the work of a prominent LGBTQ rights group, calling it an illegal entity.
Sexual Minorities Uganda has been the East African nation’s most prominent support group for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people since 2004.
Its leader, Frank Mugisha, said Saturday that authorities who oversee non-governmental organizations advised him to suspend activities, saying his group lacked needed documentation.
“This means that the life-saving work we do is on hold. We can’t protect and support vulnerable LGBT people,” he said. “The background, of course, is homophobia and transphobia.”
The NGO Bureau said in a statement that the group needed to stop work “with immediate effect” because it’s neither a company nor an NGO.
The case against Sexual Minorities Uganda stems from the group’s name itself. The registrar of companies declined to register that name, saying it was unsuitable. A judge agreed, and the group’s appeal to a higher court is awaiting judgement, Mugisha said.
He said that because of the hostility to his group over the years, he decided to run it as “an association” instead of an NGO.
Homosexuality is illegal in Uganda under a colonial-era law that criminalizes sex acts “against the order of nature,” and LGBTQ people face widespread discrimination.
Some Ugandan officials have urged tough new legislation after a panel of judges nullified an anti-gay law enacted by President Yoweri Museveni in 2014 amid international condemnation.
That law, invalidated because it had been passed by lawmakers during a session that lacked a quorum, prescribed punishments of up to life in prison for individuals convicted of engaging in same-sex activity.
The original version of that bill, first introduced in 2009, included the death penalty for what it called aggravated acts of homosexuality.
The study also found that the proportion of adolescents who were assigned female at birth and have come out as transgender also has not increased, which contradicts claims that adolescents whose birth sex is female are more susceptible to this so-called external influence.
“The hypothesis that transgender and gender diverse youth assigned female at birth identify as transgender due to social contagion does not hold up to scrutiny and should not be used to argue against the provision of gender-affirming medical care for adolescents,” study senior author Dr. Alex S. Keuroghlian, director of the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center at the Fenway Institute and the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Gender Identity Program, said in a statement.
The “social contagion” theory can be traced back to a 2018 paperpublished in the journal PLOS One. Dr. Lisa Littman, who at the time was a professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University, coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” which she described as adolescents experiencing a conflict between their birth sex and gender identity “suddenly during or after puberty.” These adolescents, she wrote, “would not have met the criteria for gender dysphoria in childhood” and are experiencing dysphoria due to social influence.
Littman also hypothesized that adolescents assigned female at birth are more likely to be affected by social contagion and, as a result, are overrepresented in groups of adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria when compared to those who were assigned male at birth.
After intense debate andcriticism, PLOS One conducted a post-publication reassessment of the article, and issued a correction that included changing the headline to clarify that Littman did not survey transgender or gender-diverse youth themselves, but actually surveyed their parents. The correction also noted that, “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is not a formal mental health diagnosis at this time.”
To test the social contagion theory, researchers used data from the 2017 and 2019 biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which collected gender identity data across 16 states from ages 12 to 18. In 2017, 2.4%, or 2,161 of the 91,937 adolescents surveyed, identified as trans or gender diverse. In 2019, that percentage dropped slightly to 1.6%, or 1,640 of 105,437 adolescents surveyed.
Researchers concluded that the decrease in the overall percentage of adolescents identifying as trans or gender diverse “is incongruent with the (rapid-onset gender dysphoria hypothesis) that posits social contagion.”
The study also found that the number of transgender adolescents who were assigned male at birth outnumbered those assigned female at birth in both 2017 and 2019, providing additional evidence against a “notion of social contagion with unique susceptibility” among those assigned female at birth.
The social contagion hypothesis, by assuming that youth are coming out, for example, because their friends are, asserts that there’s some social desirability to being trans. Some supporters of the theory, according to the study, also believe that more youth identify as trans or gender diverse because those identities are less stigmatized than cisgender sexual minority identities, or those who identify with their birth sex and are lesbian, bisexual, gay or queer, among other sexual identities.
To evaluate these claims, researchers examined rates of bullying among adolescents who identified as trans and gender diverse, and those who did not.
They found that, consistent with other surveys, trans and gender-diverse youth were significantly more likely to be victims of school bullying (at 38.7% in 2017 and 45.4% in 2019) compared to cisgender lesbian, gay and bisexual youth (at 30.5% in 2017 and 28.7% in 2019) and cisgender, heterosexual youth (at 17.1% in 2017 and 16.6% in 2019).
“The idea that attempts to flee sexual minority stigma drive teenagers to come out as transgender is absurd, especially to those of us who provide treatment to [transgender and gender diverse] youth,” study lead author Dr. Jack Turban, incoming assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a statement. “The damaging effects of these unfounded hypotheses in further stigmatizing transgender and gender diverse youth cannot be understated. We hope that clinicians, policymakers, journalists, and anyone else who contributes to health policy will review these findings.”
They wrote that despite the methodological flaws in Littman’s study, the concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria “has been used in recent legislative debates to argue for and subsequently enact policies that prohibit gender-affirming medical care” for trans and gender diverse adolescents.
An increasing number of states have also tried to ban or restrict trans youths’ access to gender-affirming medical care through legislation. The number of bills seeking to restrict gender-affirming health care for transgender youths has grown from one in 2018 to 36 this year, according to an analysis by NBC News. Governors in three states — Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee — have successfully signed such restrictions into law, though judges have prevented those measures from taking effect in Alabama and Arkansas.
The study lists several limitations, including that the data were collected through a school-based survey and, as a result, youths who don’t attend school were not represented. It also noted that youths were asked, “What is your sex?” and that response options were limited to female and male. It didn’t ask about respondents’ “sex assigned at birth” and didn’t include an additional question about their “gender identity,” which is an established research method for asking about gender identity. But the researchers creditedseveralstudies that found trans and gender-diverse youths are aware of the differences between their sex assigned at birth and gender identity.
Actor Kevin Spacey has been ordered to pay nearly $31 million in damages to production company MRC for alleged sexual misconduct behind the scenes of the Netflix series House of Cards.
The order from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mel Red Recana confirmed an award previously handed down by an arbitrator in October, 2020.
Spacey, who was an executive producer on the series and played president Frank Underwood, was dropped from both roles just days after the allegations came to light in 2017.
Spacey was first accused of misconduct by actor Anthony Rapp in a Buzzfeed story alleging that Spacey had made a sexual advance on him in Spacey’s apartment in 1986, when Rapp was 14. Production on the show was suspended two days later.
Two days after that, CNN reported that Spacey created a “toxic” work environment on set, making overtly crude comments and touching young male staffers without consent.
The allegations of groping prompted an MRC internal investigation.
MRC argued that the two-time Oscar-winning actor owed them millions in lost profits because his misconduct forced them to remove Spacey from House of Card’s sixth season and cut the show’s episode order from thirteen to eight episodes. The arbitrator ruled in MRC’s favor, finding Spacey’s behavior violated the production company’s sexual harassment policy with respect to five House of Cards crew members, and constituted a material breach of his agreements as an actor and executive producer.
Earlier this year, Spacey’s attorneys, Stephen G. Larson and Jonathan E. Phillips, sued to throw out the multi-million dollar judgement, arguing, “The truth is that while Spacey participated in a pervasive on-set culture that was filled with sexual innuendoes, jokes, and innocent horseplay, he never sexually harassed anyone. In fact, as the evidence established and the Arbitrator recognized in the Award, the few times Spacey was told that his conduct made someone feel uncomfortable or was in any way unwanted, he stopped.”
In May, Spacey was charged by the U.K.’s Crown Prosecution Service with four counts of sexual assault and one count of “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.” The alleged incidents took place in London and Gloucestershire between 2005 and 2013.
Spacey, 62, stars in the upcoming feature Peter Five Eight — his first major role in five years — playing “a charismatic man in black.”
The tagline for the film is, “The guilty always pay the price.”
The public library in a small Iowa farming town has been embroiled in a monthslong controversy spurred by anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, attempts to censor books with progressive and LGBTQ themes and the alleged harassment of LGBTQ staff members.
The situation reached a tipping point last month when the library — a place referred to by some as the “heart of the community” — was forced to close for more than a week after its interim director resigned, saying he felt ostracized for being gay.
It’s indicative of an undercurrent of homophobia that exists in the town among a small portion of its 5,000 residents, according to more than a dozen current and former Vinton residents. Although not representative of the entire community, the controversy has divided it in recent months, racking up national headlines and leaving some LGBTQ residents feeling unsafe and unwelcome.
With efforts to censor LGBTQ books in many communities across the U.S., along with increased threats targeting Drag Queen Story Hour events, the situation in Vinton appears to be a microcosm of a nationwide trend. It also marks the arrival of a new battleground in the culture wars: public libraries.
Vinton Public Library in Vinton, Iowa.Google Mpas
“This in particular has really put a dark cloud over the community,” said Dan Engledow, a 42-year-old gay man who has lived in Vinton all his life. “There’s a small group of people who have caused lots of problems.”
Vinton now finds itself facing not only a dearth of library services, which many residents depend on, but also larger questions about how welcoming the community is toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.
“Like any small, Midwestern community, it’s really not that open to a lot of the LGBTQ community,” said Molly Jennings, a former editor at The Vinton Eagle and Cedar Valley Times. “It’s the first time that I recall that it has been this blatant.”
‘Not what this town is about’
The library’s simmering culture clash dates back to late 2020, a few months after Janette McMahon, a woman with decades of experience as a library administrator, took over as director from Virginia Holsten, who retired after more than 30 years at the library, McMahon said.
“Change gets really hard when things have stayed the same a long time,” McMahon said.
In January 2021, she hired Colton Neely, who is gay, as the new children’s librarian. She called him “utterly fantastic” but said that after hiring him, the environment some patrons were creating at the library started to become less “comfortable.”
Within a few months after Neely was hired, McMahon said, a patron whom she did not name — though others familiar with the matter, including Neely, have identified this person as the pastor’s wife — checked out several children’s books and refused to return them for a prolonged period of time. One of them was written by first lady Jill Biden and another was by Vice President Kamala Harris (Harris visited the library in 2019 to read hers). “Sometimes People March,” a book about activism that was checked out, referenced the Black Lives Matter movement and the Pride flag.
Eventually, the books came back, but McMahon said some patrons had already started accusing her of having a liberal agenda.
“Gossip runs rampant in lots of places, but in small towns it tends to go very fast,” she said.
In April 2021, the pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church in Vinton sent an email to a board member who has since resigned expressing concern that the library was biased toward “certain political positions and a certain political party,” according to a copy of the email shared with NBC News. The pastor, Stephen Preus, took issue with the same books and asked why the library had not chosen to instead display a biography of former President Donald Trump and a book by former Vice President Mike Pence. What Preus found even more concerning, according to his email, was what he called the library’s promotion of leftist ideologies, including “the LGBT agenda,” “transgenderism” and “Black Lives Matter Inc.”
Preus did not respond to a request for comment.
Eventually, McMahon said, the growing fervor in the town made her decide she couldn’t effectively run the library. She resigned in July 2021, after serving just over a year, and moved about an hour and a half away. She now leads a public library in Dewitt, Iowa.
With McMahon gone, Neely stepped into her shoes until the library’s board of trustees could hire a more permanent replacement. For months, Neely said, he operated the library from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. essentially by himself. All the while, he alleged, he dealt with both subtle and blatant homophobia from a handful of patrons.
One day, when he was wearing a bow tie, a patron told him to “dress down,” he recalled. “She said, ‘That’s not what this library is about; that’s not what this town is about.’”
Colton Neely at the Vinton Public Library.Samantha Hernandez / USA Today Network
Neely also alleged that longtime Vinton resident Brooke Kruckenberg made comments that Neely perceived as homophobic in front of him and her children while at the library. McMahon corroborated that she had heard Kruckenberg and other patrons refer to Neely as “the gay man” in what she perceived as a negative way and that Neely had been the target of what she characterized as microaggressions from Kruckenberg.
And while he was interim director, Neely said, the secretary and treasurer of the library board, Jennifer Kreutner, suggested the library obscure certain titles — including those covering LGBTQ topics — with book sleeves. Kreutner had previously objected to a summer reading challenge that had encouraged patrons to read books by people of color and LGBTQ authors, according to Neely, McMahon and another person familiar with the matter.
Kreutner’s suggestion to cover certain books with sleeves or move them elsewhere in the library was the topic of a heated library board meeting Tuesday night. During the meeting, another board member accused Kreutner of censorship, and several board members argued with Kreutner about some of her behaviors while on the board, according to an audio recording of the meeting shared with NBC News.
“I don’t think it’s a conflict of interest to represent people in the community that come forward with their views and concerns,” Kreutner said at the meeting. She then apologized after a board member accused her of only representing a conservative Christian viewpoint, though she added, “I represent the entire rural community, but most of them are conservative Christians.”
Neither Kruckenberg nor Kreutner responded to NBC News’ requests for comment.
Jimmy Kelly, chair of the library’s board of trustees, said the board was not officially made aware of any discrimination of Neely or other staff at the time of the alleged incidents. He also said in an interview before Tuesday’s board meeting that he had no prior knowledge of Kreutner’s alleged suggestion to obscure certain titles with book covers.
‘Something wasn’t right’
In November, the library board hired a new director. Renee Greenlee, a librarian with years of experience and a master’s degree in library and information science, was someone Neely thought “could fight this crowd back.”
“From the moment I shook her hand, I was like, ‘She’s the one to be in this position,’” Neely said.
Greenlee had worked for about three years as a library assistant at a publiclibrary in Marion, Iowa, where she helped facilitate Marion’s first LGBTQ Pride event, including a drag queen storytime event and a parade around the library. In January, shortly after taking the job in Vinton, she was selected from more than 1,300 librarians around the country by the American Library Association for the I Love My Librarian Award.
Neely said circumstances started to improve at the library after Greenlee took over, and he moved back into the children’s librarian position. Still, he struggled at times to attract families to his storytime events. He said he believes this was partly because parents seemed to disapprove of the fact that he is gay.
“Deep down, I felt like something wasn’t right,” he said.
At a library board meeting March 9, a motion was put on the agenda to establish gender-neutral bathrooms in the building. It passed unanimously, but at the meeting, Kruckenberg joined the chorus of residents claiming the library staff had a “liberal agenda.”
“I don’t believe the library is representing our town well with hiring a majority of staff who are openly a part of the LGBTQ community,” she wrote in a statement, which she then read at the meeting, according to attendees and meeting minutes. Neely and Joey Anderson, who were two of the library’s six employees at the time, are openly LGBTQ, Neely said.
Kruckenberg said she took issue with a “subtle, yet noticeable, display of the LGBTQ agenda,” taking form in the “choices of books on display, the cross-dressing of employees, Facebook posts and the question of non-gender bathrooms being considered.”
Greenlee left that March meeting “white as a ghost,” Neely said.
Anderson, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, said in an email to NBC News that Greenlee pulled them into her office the day after the meeting to tell them what had happened. They called the experience “devastating.”
“It contributed to some pretty terrible dysphoria over the next several months,” they said.
According to meeting minutes, a prepared statement shared with NBC News and local news reports, Kruckenberg alleged at the March meeting that she had spoken to library members and parents in the community who had decided to step back from supporting the library, or stop coming completely, because of “staffing decisions” and the “liberal books that are on the shelves.” She said she wasn’t asking for any books to be banned or removed from the library, but instead for the books to be “balanced.”
“For every book on display with a topic of becoming a transgender,” Kruckenberg’s prepared statement said, “I would ask that there is a book on display that discusses how God created and designed people as either male or female from birth, for life.”
Kreutner, who takes the meeting minutes, recorded the March meeting, but she declined to produce the audio file for Greenlee and the city administrator when they asked her for it, board members said during Tuesday’s meeting. The board then spent $300 retaining a lawyer, who sent a letter to Kreutner telling her she was legally obligated to produce the file under public records laws, a copy of the letter shows.Kelly, the board chair, confirmed Kreutner eventually turned over the audio file.
After the March board meeting, Greenlee compiled a seven-page response to Kruckenberg’s allegations that included a diversity audit of the children’s book collection. At an April 13 library board meeting, she presented her findings, which showed that of the nearly 5,800 children’s books and other materials in the library, only seven books had subject headings with the terms “LGBT,” “gay” or “transgender.” There were 31 books with Christian-related subject headings.
Greenlee also condemned Kruckenberg’s comments from the March meeting, video of the April meeting shows, saying they were “discriminatory” and “hurtful” and that she had instructed her staff to let her know if they felt unsafe, threatened or harassed.
“I very much wish that every community member could be happy with all aspects of the library, but I have been in libraries long enough to know that is not realistic,” she wrote in a public statement, which she read in full at the meeting.
Neely was sitting behind Kruckenberg and her family — whom several residents described as a powerful force in town. When Greenlee finished speaking, Neely said many of them started shaking their heads.
“They were just clearly not taking it,” he said.
By May 23, Greenlee called her staff into her office, according to Anderson, and tearfully told them she had put in her resignation letter and accepted a position at the Cedar Rapids Public Library. She said she would leave in early June.
“We’d be without a director, yet again, and still under attack by community members, leaders, and board members,” Anderson said in an email to NBC News.
Greenlee declined to comment on the record for this story.
The library board accepted Greenlee’s resignation and reappointed Neely as interim director at a June 8 board meeting. The meeting drew about 100 people, a crowd so big it had to be moved to City Hall, according to Neely and Kelly, the board chair, both of whom attended the meeting.
Molly Rach, a library assistant for the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who’s lived in Vinton with her husband for eight years, was one of many residents who spoke at the meeting to express disappointment in the situation, saying the community had “run out two highly qualified, highly credentialed library directors.”
“This library is indeed going to suffer, but not because of diverse books or staff members who identify as LGBTQIA+,” she said at the meeting, “but because you are going to have a hard time finding anyone who is willing to put up with being targeted by community members for simply doing their job.”
‘I’ve had it’
It was just a matter of weeks before Neely left, too.
“You could tell half the crowd was just like, ‘Ugh, you’re disgusting,’” he said of the June 8 meeting. “That was the board meeting where I was just like, ‘I’ve had it.’”
He penned a resignation letter to the library board on June 27, writing that despite his hard-earned qualifications, he felt reduced to just “the gay man of the library.”
“It hurts and I am disappointed,” he wrote.
Neely’s departure coincided with that of another staffer.The sudden exitsforced the library to close for more than a week at the beginning of July, leaving residents who relied on the library, like Kelsey Ann Wiederin, a stay-at-home mom of three, in the lurch.
“They just closed their doors, and that was it,” she said.
Wiederin moved to Vinton from the nearby community of La Porte City about a year ago. She said Neely had a knack for interacting with her oldest child, who has a disability. Finding out he resigned earlier this summer was “heartbreaking,” she said.
The other staffer who left around the time of Neely’s departure was Connie Bennett, who confirmed to NBC News she was put on administrative leave. In an email to NBC News, Anderson accused Bennett of previously making what they perceived to be subtle transphobic remarks. During Tuesday’s board meeting, Kelly said an investigation into a staff member, whom he did not identify, had concluded, and that the staff member would be returning to work. He also said theboard voted to refer the situation to the city’s Title VI coordinator for continued monitoring. Title VI is a provision in the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination of protected classes in programs that receive federal funding.
When contacted by NBC News, Bennett would only confirm that she would be returning to work and referred additional questions to the city administrator, Chris Ward, who said in an email that any records regarding personal employee information are confidential unless that employee has been fired, demoted or decided to quit.
After learning that Bennett would return to work at the library, Anderson, who had been the only remaining staff member since Neely’s departure, resigned Tuesday.
The library building is now open for half of its usual hours, but only because seven of the nine board members were trained to help run the library, Kelly said. On Tuesday, the board selected a new director, though she likely won’t start for another month. The incoming director asked that her name not be published before she resigns from her current job.
Meanwhile, the library’s diminished capacity means reduced summer programs and less access to the building’s resources, such as free internet and office supplies for the low-income residents who need them.
Last week, Vinton resident Crystal Pladsen-Coder spoke at a City Council meeting, reading from a petition with more than 400 signatures that urged city leaders to “take a stand” and “lead the way as we reclaim our city.” As the controversy at the library unfolded, she also led an effort to place Pride signs on yards across Vinton in recent months. Shortly after she spoke, someone else used the public comment period to decry the dangers of “critical race” and “critical gender” theory.
A sign promoting diversity on the front law of Molly Rach’s house.Molly Rach
Another resident said the words of “one person have been used to brand an entire community,” a sentiment many current and former residents of Vinton share.
“The people that are the loudest kind of get all the attention,” said Tracie Walker, a former Vinton resident who now lives close by.
Walker said she found herself disappointed as she followed the controversy over the past few months. She said she felt like Vinton residents have been lumped together with what she called a very small group of people who don’t represent everyone.
Walker raised her two sons, who are gay, in Vinton in a house near the library. One of her sons, Jordan, said he didn’t always know he was gay, but growing up in Vinton, what he knew for sure was that in some places, he felt comfortable, and in others, he didn’t.
One of the places he felt safe was the library. He was there all the time from fifth grade until about high school, when he said he started “working tirelessly to be passibly straight.”
After high school, Jordan, now 37, felt compelled to leave and eventually landed in Chicago, which he called the “perfect spot” for someone who missed the Midwest to live as his “true self.”
Like many moms, Tracie Walker said she had always hoped her sons would move back near their hometown and raise their families in the area. The past few months, however, have made her realize that dream may be a lost cause.
