Library plagued by layoffs & reduced hours after community votes to cut funding over Pride displays

The library has been slapped with a $2.1 million budget cut because it celebrated LGBTQ+ authors.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A community in Arkansas is beginning to feel the effects of a drastic cut to its local library’s budget resulting from conservative backlash over Pride displays.

The Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library (CCJPL) in Jonesboro, Arkansas, has been forced to reduce its hours of operation, cut services, and lay off over a dozen employees. The cut has also had a dramatic impact on the library’s materials budget.

“It’s really sad,” CCJPL director Vanessa Adams told HuffPost. “There are fewer books and fewer e-books, which were really popular.”

According to Dean MacDonald, an advocate for CCJPL, local conservative opposition to Pride displays at the library’s main branch in June 2021 were “a huge catalyst and the main reason why the library was defunded.”

As staff and supporters told HuffPost, the displays, which showcased books by LGBTQ+ authors, different Pride flags, and children’s books featuring LGBTQ+ characters, were similar to those the library had mounted for years. But amid the recent nationwide push by conservatives to ban and restrict access to books by Black and LGBTQ+ authors, as well as efforts to characterize LGBTQ+ books as pornographic and events like drag queen story hours as a threat to children, CCJPL began receiving complaints about its Pride displays.

David Eckert, who served as the library’s director at the time and later resigned amid the controversy, told KAIT-TV in 2021 that the displays had been..

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