1 July 2022 — 0740 mdt
Flathead County’s library board now is a de facto
subcommittee of the Flathead GOP’s central committee
By James Conner
The Flathead County Library before it became the Imagine If Library. Larger image.
Yesterday, retired librarian Marsha Sultz, the last non-right wing ideologue on Flathead County’s library board, resigned from the board following the Flathead County Commission’s decision to appoint Carmen Cuthbertson to the board to replace Connie Leistiko, a former law school dean. At the Flathead Beacon, Micah Drew has the details.
Last year Cuthbertson asked the board to remove the book Gender Queer from the library, arguing it was erotica without redeeming literary merit that had no place on the shelves of a public library. Hundreds of public libraries across the country have received similar requests.
The other library board members are Doug Adams, a Republican who lost an election for the Montana House of Representatives in 2014, Dave Ingram, who lost the 2022 GOP primary for HD-7 (downtown Kalispell), and Heidi Rodel, a homeschooler and former chair of the Flathead GOP’s women’s club. The Flathead GOP supported Cuthbertson’s bid to join the library board.
Of the three candidates submitted to the commissioners, one has been a stalwart in the effort to protect children. Carmen Cuthbertson, a member of FCRW, has stood strong against the liberal influences attempting to take hold of the public library system.
Carmen holds a Masters Degree in English and Russian literature and linguistics from the University of Zurich. Carmen speaks several languages, and is an extensive world traveler. Carmen has lived in Flathead County for more than 25 years, and is a local business owner. Carmen has raised her family in the Flathead, and is proud to call this her home.
Carmen needs our support in her bid for library trustee. Please call and/or email our County Commissioners before June 30 to show your support for Carmen.
Library boards are seldom populated solely by deeply partisan activists of one political party. Instead, library trustees, like hospital board and nonprofit board members, tend to be highly respected leaders who are chosen for their intellect, education, experience, temperament, and dedication to improving their communities; men and women who view public service as a board member as a nonpartisan calling, not as an opportunity to promote a partisan agenda.
The Flathead County Commission, however, is using library and health board positions as rewards for political loyalty and service. It’s the old fashioned political machine patronage model, and it’s not a good idea.
Book challenges and library staff salary reductions
Book challenges. Across the nation, hundreds of libraries have received challenges to Gender Queer, a graphic novel — which is what long, hard covered comic books are called — that’s, well, graphic. Its critics argue it’s just another dirty book that has no place on the shelves of a public library because it might corrupt the morals of weak and impressionable people. They also fear that the presence of a book on a public library’s shelf puts a government stamp of approval on that book’s subject. Their sincere opposition to the book’s presence in the library reveals a conviction that people cannot be trusted to exercise good judgment on their own, a point noted by Justice Potter Stewart, appointed by Eisenhower, in his dissent in Ginzburg v. United States (1966).
Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. Long ago, those who wrote our First Amendment charted a different course. They believed a society can be truly strong only when it is truly free. In the realm of expression, they put their faith, for better or for worse, in the enlightened choice of the people, free from the interference of a policeman’s intrusive thumb or a judge’s heavy hand. So it is that the Constitution protects coarse expression as well as refined, and vulgarity no less than elegance. A book worthless to me may convey something of value to my neighbor. In the free society to which our Constitution has committed us, it is for each to choose for himself.
Cuthbertson, Adams, and the other critics of Gender Queer, have little faith in the good judgment of their fellow citizens. Their approach is “You are weak, but we are strong. We will protect you from yourself by choosing for you.”
Library staff salary reductions. Last year, led by Adams, the library board reduced the salary for the head librarian, ostensibly to save money. If you believe that, you will believe anything. There were far better ways to cut the library’s budget. The salary was reduced to reduce the importance of the position, to cut the head librarian down to size. That scared off highly qualified applicants. Finally, the board hired a new librarian, from Alabama, Adams’ home state, who has not finished her bachelors degree, let alone the M.A. in library science that head librarians of Montana libraries of similar size to the Flathead’s are expected to possess. That sets a precedent for hiring as the library’s director a non-library science credentialed board member when the current head librarian resigns or gets fired.
The road we must never travel
None of this affects me directly. Before the internet and Amazon, getting a library card was the third thing I did after moving to a new community (obtaining a drivers license and registering to vote came first). Now my private library numbers approximately 1,500 books, I have digital subscriptions to periodicals, and government publications are available online. I no longer need to fight for a parking place in Kalispell, and I no longer need to risk exposure to influenza or Covid in a crowded room full of strangers. All Flathead County’s library (which never should have been renamed Imagine If) has that I might need are collections of old local newspapers and perhaps maps.
But indirectly, by making the county’s library a laughingstock, the library board’s behavior affects me by making the Flathead a slightly less pleasant place to live. We are not yet at the book burning stage. The trustees and the zealots supporting them are not piling books in the street in anticipation of a soul cleansing bonfire. But bibliocide is where the road the trustees are traveling ends; where, as Harvard Magazine reported, it ended in Bosnia three decades ago.
Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings,” wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine in 1823. Heine’s words seem uncannily prescient about the twentieth century. The largest single act of book burning in modern history took place in 1992 when, on August 25, Serb nationalist forces began a three-day incendiary assault on the National and University Library of Bosnia. Despite sniper fire, the people of Sarajevo risked their lives to form a human chain and pass books from the flames. “We managed to save just a few very special books. Everything else burnt down,” one citizen reported. “And a lot of our heritage, our national heritage, lay down there in ashes.” Nearly 1.5 million books-including 155,000 rare books and manuscripts-the state archives, and all the Bosnian periodical literature published since the mid-1800s were lost.
So testified András Riedlmayer, bibliographer in Islamic art and architecture at Harvard’s Fine Arts Library, before the 1995 Congressional hearing on genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Riedlmayer and Jeffrey Spurr, cataloger for Islamic art in the Aga Khan Program at the Fine Arts Library, are spearheading efforts at Harvard and in the wider academic community to reconstruct the Bosnian National Library and to deter such “crimes against humanity” in the future. They are gathering evidence to convince the U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to identify the burning of the library as a separate incident in their indictments, not simply one of many attacks on civilian areas in Sarajevo. Such destruction should not be viewed merely as the collateral damage of warfare, says Spurr, but “the deliberate, targeted, policy-driven assassination of culture, in its very worst form.”
In campaigns of so-called “ethnic cleansing,” Serb and Croat nationalists have razed mosques and churches, torched communal archives and libraries, and bulldozed cemeteries and monuments to erase the material memory of a society in which Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians have lived side by side for centuries. After one 500-year-old mosque had been destroyed, a young Muslim man said, “It’s not that my family was burned down, but it’s my foundation that burned. I was destroyed.”
International law has recognized the link between genocide and the targeted destruction of culture since the 1948 Genocide Convention. Yet if Serb commanders are in fact prosecuted for destroying the National Library, Riedlmayer says, “It would be the first prosecution before an international tribunal specifically for crimes against culture.”
The Flathead’s county commissioners are making bad appointments to the library and health boards, and perhaps to other boards. The Flathead’s voters are electing to the county commission partisan hacks and culture warriors who are turning a place of great natural beauty into a society governed by fear, prejudice, and mediocrity.