At 12 miles southwest of Grand Rapids, it would lie at about 7 o’clock if a clock face were interposed on the famous “palm” map. It’s about a mile, as the crow flies, from Sunrise Acres Egg Farm. It’s a mile-and-a-half from the nearest Meijer grocery. Jamestown Township, population 9,630, is deep in Michigan’s Dutch Reformed farm country.
The Township’s local library, named Patmos, is deep in something else: trouble. The library will lose 84% of its annual $245,000 budget after voters refused to approve an annual millage renewal for 2023. A millage is a percentage tax on property at its assessed value, and it seems Michigan localities employ annual, voter-approved millages to fund a variety of local enterprises.
The vote wasn’t particularly close, either. It failed 1,142 votes “yes” (37.5%) to 1,905 votes “no” (62.5%). Other tax items on the ballot succeeded, including funding for the fire department and secondary road improvements. “This was such a great story to see,” FRC’s senior fellow for Education Studies Meg Kilgannon told The Washington Stand. “It captures the determination of citizens who are awake.”
How did the library’s funding become so unpopular? Although there was a rate increase from 0.4186 mills (0.04%) to 0.60 mills (0.06%), that wasn’t the real issue. “I never saw any opposition to the actual dollar amount or taxes,” said Jesse Dillman, a resident who started a GoFundMe campaign to fund the library. “It was 100% about the cultural issue of having LGBT material in the library.”
Parents mobilized against the library after it featured sexually explicit LGBT books such as “Gender Queer: A Memoir” in a June Pride display, and library staff subsequently refused to remove them from the library. “Since meetings with the library staff and board had no effect, concerned citizens mounted a campaign to stop funding the library with taxpayer money. And their effort passed overwhelmingly.”
Media reports have attempted to demonize the parent’s groups by emphasizing that some of the rhetoric accused the transgressive books of “grooming” children. The leftist establishment, including dictionaries, big tech corporations, progressive politicians, and especially the media, unilaterally decided several months ago that “groomer” was an “anti-LGBTQ slur” after parents have successfully and accurately employed the term to defend their young children against indoctrination in sexual perversion in a wide variety of contacts.
This is great and the only way to get things back to normal. The key is to go after the funding. It’s how the Federal Govt has continued to expand its influence. They’ve made states and towns dependent on federal funding to operate…if you don’t follow their rules they’ve already shown they’ll withhold funding for even necessities like lunch programs.
This needs to be done in every town that has a Library, probably don’t need Libraries either since they are told what books to have. Great World we live in, have you had enough of it yet? Remember these are your Kids and Grandkids that they are now going after, time for you to say enough is enough.