You gotta love the folks out in Livingston Parish!  They always seem to provide lots of drama to write about.

Just when all the elections are over and things seem pretty slow, Livingston jumps in and bails us pundits out with great material.  In this case, it is the absolute circus that is going on with thier library system.

I am not going to get down into the weeds with the budget issues.  Michael Lunsford of Citizens for a New Louisiana already did a great job of that here on the Hayride in his December 20 column and in a video posted on the Citizens for a New Louisiana Facebook page.  I will just stick with some commentary about what is going on over there.

This whole trainwreck started a couple of years ago with one library board member trying to get books with inappropriate sexual content moved out of the children’s and young adult (grades 6-12, not actually adult at all) sections of the library and into the adult section.  Make no mistake, these are not the sex education books of the Gen X childhood.  These are illustrated sexual how-to manuals, erotic stories, etc.  I don’t understand how anyone can even make the argument that these books are appropriate for children when newspapers have to blur the pictures in stories about this topic.  If it can’t be printed in the newspaper because it violates the newspaper’s obscenity standards, it probably does not belong in the children’s section of the library.

When this all started in 2022, only one board member wanted to move the books.  The other eight members all voted against her consistently and the library director (who later resigned) opposed moving them as well.

That board member has now moved on to the parish council, but fortunately most of those who voted against her have since been replaced by more conservative people.  There is now a conservative majority on the board, and things have started to change for the better.

But change does not come without pain.  Lots and lots of pain.

This conflict has now moved beyond moving inappropriate books out of the children’s section.  It is now about the liberals (all 12 or so of them) in Livingston Parish opposing everything that the now conservative board does, no matter what it is.  They are apparently so angry over losing control (and the ability to indoctrinate children) that they just want to oppose anything and everything that the board does.  Just like the left opposes everything that Trump does, no matter what it is.  They seem perfectly okay with the idea of destroying the library system that they claim to be protecting, so long as they can pin the blame on conservatives.

Of course, they also have a LOT of help (and $$$) from people who live nowhere near Livingston Parish, or Louisiana for that matter.

Parish Council members can appoint and remove library board members at will; sadly, there are only a few council members that are trying to fix this problem by replacing library board members or appointing more conservative members.  But they are not a majority.  Most of the council members seem to be content with the library situation as it has been.  The council chairman’s (District 4 Councilman John Wascom) board appointment resigned as soon as a conservative majority was attained.  The leftists tend to take their ball and go home (or at least scream profanities from the sidelines) when they lose control, but they seem quite happy when they have an 8-1 advantage.  Wascom then appointed a Livingston Library Alliance member to replace her.

Livingston Library Alliance is the current front group for the leftists that want to keep inappropriate books in front of the kids.  Wascom is a registered Republican, but maybe he is one of those politicians in Livingston Parish that puts an “R” behind his name because he knows it is the only way to get elected.  There have been quite a few RINO’s that have come out of that parish, despite how overwhelmingly conservative the people are.

District 3 Councilman Billy Taylor appointed someone to the board who voted with the leftists for two meetings and then resigned.  At this point, he has not bothered to replace her after several months.  Maybe he has more important things to do than protect children from exposure to sexual material at a young age.

Parish President Randy Delatte has been mostly absent from this fight.  The parish president has an appointment to the board, and shortly after he took office in 2024 he appointed a lady who seemed to be very good, and then found out she was ineligible to serve on the board (shouldn’t he have figured that out before he appointed her?).

He has never gotten around to appointing anyone else.

I guess his constant fight-picking with the parish council over ridiculous minutiae takes up all his time.  Maybe he will get around to protecting the children of his parish after he has himself firmly entrenched as King of LP.

Most recently the leftists opposed the budget.  Again, Citizens for a New Louisiana has posted the budget information in a video on their Facebook page, so I won’t go into that.  Suffice to say that the leftists opposed a budget that increased the total budget amount from last year while telling everyone in the parish that the conservatives are defunding the library.  Sadly, many people seem to be buying this line of horse manure.  People who should know better are drinking the Kool-Aid.  There were cuts made to specific programs, like Comic-Con.  But it seems to me that reducing a $20,000 expenditure for a one-day event at one library branch that is likely attended by more people from outside of their parish than parish residents is simply good governance.  I am sorry, but anyone who disagrees may be in danger of forfeiting their conservative credentials.

As it turns out, most of those cuts may have been proposed by the library director, who the leftists love, and not the library board, who they hate.  So let me paint a picture for you:  the library director proposes cuts to programs in a private meeting with some board members.  The board then announces those cuts in a public meeting.  The leftists show up at the meeting with prepared talking points handed out at the door to skewer the board members over the cuts and accuse them of defunding the library.  The library director, who is attending the meeting, never mentions that she is the one who proposed the cuts.

If I were a suspicious man, I would say that smelled like a setup to make the board look bad to the public. To all of you Christian conservatives who are upset at the library board, I suggest that you wake up.  You are being played by people who are totally opposed to your values and beliefs.  You can find the discussion about the budget cuts in the December 17 library board meeting starting at the 41:00:00 mark.

Certain people in Livingston Parish who have championed the leftist view in the libraries have also become quite famous over this battle.  They have been interviewed, and gotten book and movie deals out of this.  Oprah talks about their “brave” fight.  The national media has been fawning all over them.  They have an endless stream of money donated to them to fund as many failed lawsuits and appeals as their heart’s desire.  It appears that almost all this money is coming from out of state.

The sad truth is that the left has a well-funded machine in place to fight these types of reforms in the library.  There is money pouring in from all over the country to push how-to sex manuals and novels with graphic sexual content for children in the public library.  Of course, this is also a scene that has played out across the country.  Parents are waking up to the fact that these books have been made available to their children, and they are not happy.  And they protest.  And are usually ignored by the powers that be, as the Livingston library board ignored parents for so long.  They eventually get thrown out by the voters, which ignites a bonfire on the left and they go on the attack with falsehoods, untruths and propaganda to confuse and misinform the conservative residents of Livingston Parish (or any other place).

And if you still don’t believe that there are inappropriate books in the children’s section of the library, watch the November 19, 2024 library board meeting and listen to a local pastor read some excerpts from one of the books in the library board meeting.  He was reading from one of the very same books that was available to 6^th graders.  You can find it here starting at about the 1:44:00 mark:

If you listen to that and then tell me that middle school children should be exposed to this kind of stuff in public libraries, funded by our tax dollars, then you and I really just don’t really have anything else to talk about.