It used to be you could get fired from a government job for being too prejudiced.
Now, in Sterling, Kansas, you get fired for not being prejudiced enough.
Last week, the town’s library board sacked both the library director, Kari Wheeler, and her top assistant, Brandy Lancaster.
Their offense? They didn’t cater enough to the board’s anti-LGBT agenda.
According to the former librarians, the friction started with a dispute over whether to shelve one of the books in the William Allen White Reading Program, which happens to include a gender-nonbinary character.
Each year, the program publishes a list of award-winning books for the elementary and middle-school levels. It’s a big deal in a lot of school districts and there are often rewards for reading the entire list.
When my sons were in school, the reward was a field trip to Emporia to see White’s former office at the Emporia Gazette and learn about the revered newspaperman, who won the Pulitzer Prize, rubbed elbows with presidents and was one of the leading voices for middle America from the late 1890s into the 1940s.
Wheeler had a donor who offered to buy the library the entire set of William Allen White books for this year. One of the selections is “Flight of the Puffin,” a novel including a nonbinary teen who lives on the streets after being shunned at home.
A board member told Wheeler to go ahead and order the books, but to hide “Flight of the Puffin” in her desk drawer and not check it out to anybody.
It’s an order no librarian worthy of the title would ever follow.
The rainbow incident seems to be the last straw.
In a small display case at the entry to the library, Wheeler and Lancaster were putting together a diversity display when library board Vice President Michelle Miller showed up and laid down the law: No rainbows, because they’re associated with LGBT rights.
Now, neither of the rainbow images for the display case had anything to do with that.
One was a collage of a girl in a wheelchair sitting in front of a rainbow and the other was the international symbol of autism awareness, a rainbow-colored infinity symbol.
In a June 22 board meeting that Lancaster recorded, Miller explained her rationale, such as it is: “I do not want any kind of rainbow display … especially in this month. We are in Pride month. People are on display. We have a conservative town and as a library, do not need to make political statements like Target and Bud Light.”
