Karen Van Wyk of MassResistance says her organization got involved earlier this year when residents of the small community of Lancaster learned that a homosexual group called White Mountain's Pride planned to present a drag story hour at the local Weeks Memorial Library in June.
The event was to be on a Sunday, when the library is normally closed. As the room is reportedly provided at no charge to non-profit groups, local tax dollars would have likely been used to cover the story hour's expenses, including staffing, security, lighting, etc.
"The librarian herself first tried to dissuade anybody from doing anything, lying and saying, 'Oh, I have to do this because if I don't, the ACLU will sue us,'" Van Wyk relays. That is baloney. She just wanted to cover and push people away to think there's nothing we can do about it; we have to have this event because we'll get sued."
Library trustees and the director, Barbara Robarts, did nothing to alleviate the community's concerns, and the 500+ signatures activists gathered against the event (in the town populated by about 3,200 people) went ignored by the Board of Selectmen.
But four days before the event, the local newspaper reported that at the request of library staff, it had been cancelled.
"The White Mountain Pride came up with this reason of safety concerns," Van Wyk details. "What it really was was the fact that we applied a lot of pressure, which is what is necessary in order to stop these things -- very consistent pressure."
MassResistance's next phase is to get the sexually explicit LGBT books (such as "Gender Queer" and "All Boys Aren't Blue") out of the library, or at least out of the children's section.
