Shawn Vestal: The story of sheriff and the pilfered books needs a new ending

It’s called stealing, sheriff.

When you take something that isn’t yours and don’t return it, that’s the word.

Even if it’s a book you don’t like.

Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris says he is refusing to return two books checked out from the Post Falls Public Library. Sheriff Bob found some of the content disturbing. Sheriff Bob doesn’t think the books were appropriately shelved. Sheriff Bob – who seems to have ample free time – actually prowled the stacks of local libraries recently, once with his body cam on, sniffing around for dirty books.

Two books in particular raised his hackles, according to recent reporting in The Spokesman-Review. A citizen had checked out and given Sheriff Bob copies of these books, one of which was a book on sexual health targeted at older teens and the other of which is an adult novel with mature themes. No child whose parent had gotten them a restricted library card could check them out.

Sheriff Bob deemed them “obscene” and “disturbing.” So he isn’t giving them back.

He said that he’d rather just pay for the books.

He also said: “It has nothing to do with banning books. It has nothing to do with restricting books.”

Maybe Sheriff Bob should steal a dictionary next.

Pilfering library books is a common ploy of the modern book banner. The so-called “parents rights” groups like Moms for Liberty – extreme ideologues responsible for scouring the shelves of America’s libraries for materials they object to, then defining them as “porn” or “obscenity” – are doing their best to purify the country’s libraries and schools. It’s common, the people who track these movements say, for them to simply check books out and keep them.

These folks are a malign force, who seem unfamiliar with the core principles of freedom in a diverse society. They are trying to impose a narrow view on a broad population, via unhinged, conspiratorial smears of librarians and educators as porn peddlers and pedophile groomers.

The tragedy is that, through the simple volume of their zealotry, they are making headway against a majority who support free speech and free access to information.

PEN America, which advocates for free expression, is tracking the rise of book banning in schools and libraries, as well as challenging some of the bans in court. In its report, “Banned in the USA: The Mounting Pressure to Censor,” the organization said it recorded 3,362 instances of book bans in American schools and libraries during the 2022-23 school year, involving the removal of access to 1,557 unique titles.

That was an increase of 33% from the previous year.

“The freedom to read is under assault in the United States – particularly in public schools – curtailing students’ freedom to explore words, ideas and books,” the PEN America report said.

The report continued, “Authors whose books are targeted are most frequently female, people of color, and/or LGBTQ+ individuals. Amid a growing climate of censorship, school book bans continue to spread through coordinated campaigns by a vocal minority of groups and individual actors and, increasingly, as a result of pressure from state legislation.”

Book banners are not content to simply not check out the books themselves – or to make sure their kids don’t – while leaving others to make their own choices. No, they are wildly mischaracterizing such works as porn and imposing their views on everyone else.

It’s hard to fathom: In the age of Pornhub, these zealots think the danger zone for kids is the local library.

The libraries that Sheriff Bob investigated in Post Falls and Hayden have been suffering the upheavals of this ginned-up, extreme movement. They are part of the North Idaho Community Library District, whose board meetings have often been overwhelmed by crowds railing about supposed filth in the stacks.

The last board election was a bitter, ugly affair, with two challengers running – and winning – following a campaign full of scurrilous attacks, including one ad from the Kootenai County GOP insinuating that “librarians are taking children into secret rooms and showing them obscene materials,” according to the Coeur d’Alene Press.

That was bad enough. But there is little so resonant with the darkest chapters of authoritarian history – little that carries so distinctly the whiff of smoke from a Berlin book fire – as an armed man in uniform unilaterally keeping books away from free Americans.

One of the purloined books is “Deal with It! A Whole New Approach to Your Body, Brain, and Life as a gURL,” a sex-education book for teens that the library network classified for ages 16-18, according to The S-R story.

The other, “Identical” by Ellen Hopkins, deals with the theme of sexual abuse of minors and is classified as an adult novel.

Sheriff Bob suggested in an interview that if an adult – even a parent – provided such books to a minor, it might actually be illegal, akin to giving a child drugs or alcohol.

Which is dumb and dangerous even for these dumb and dangerous times.

Book banners always drape themselves in the sheep’s wool of righteousness and the law, but Sheriff Bob’s line here is insidious and anti-American. The notion of even considering using police authority to sanction someone for having the wrong book in their home is chilling in the extreme.

Return the stolen books, Sheriff Bob. Then check out a few on freedom of speech and American liberty.