Christian city officials wants to close public library over book about trans people

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

St. Marys, Kansas Commissioner Gerard Kleinsmith is on a crusade against the local library because the library has books about LGBTQ+ people.

“This author is absolutely wrong. God does not make mistakes,” he said at an April city commission meeting about the book Rethinking Normal: A Memoir in Transition by trans author Katie Rain Hill. “God cannot make a mistake. We can make mistakes. Mankind can make a mistake. God cannot make a mistake… I will do everything I can to fight this kind of garbage.”

“If God makes you as a male, you are a male. If God makes you a female, you are a female, no matter what.”

He and his allies on the city commission – many of whom are members of an extreme religious sect that broke away from the Catholic Church – want to shut the library down.

“Some things are wrong,” said Commissioner Richard Binsfeld about the transgender books in the library. “If you live up to your morals, if you stand by your morals at all, you’d look at it and say, ‘Why do we have it?’”

The Pottawatomie Wabaunsee Regional Library has operated largely without controversy for decades. The current director – Judith Cremer – has had her job since 2003, and she said the controversy over the books started last year.

Since the library isn’t a part of the city government – it’s managed by its own board of trustees appointed by the Pottawatomie and Wabaunsee County governments and serves several small towns in the area – the city can’t shut it down. Instead, they are trying to…

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