The wife of an Arkansas Republican state lawmaker has expanded the culture wars to miniature free libraries that encourage passersby to take a book and maybe leave one.
“I have been swapping out books in little free libraries for awhile,” Jennifer Meeks announced in a Facebook post. “From what I have seen a lot of these books and other things don’t align with Christian values.”
The Aug. 1 post has since been either deleted or made private, but not before it was screenshot by the Faulkner County Social Justice Coalition, which displayed it on the group’s website.
“Today, I saw a bunch of Pride stuff in one,” Meeks said in the post. “There’s a group of leftists, especially in Conway, who are very active in keeping little libraries well-stocked.”
Meeks wrote that she had been doing some stocking of her own.
“Recently I have been picking up free Bibles at flea markets and thrift stores,” she reported. “Sometimes I find good devotion books or kids’ Bible stories at a good price to add. Or just great books, and a gospel tract is a nice idea, too.”
Meeks did not respond to a call from The Daily Beast about her literary vigilantism.
But after the coalition publicized Meeks’ post, her husband tried to claim her words were being twisted into “a complete lie” perpetrated by “a leftist, activist group.”
“She’s not removing books that she disagrees with and does not advocate … that anybody else do that,” Rep. Stephen Meeks told the Arkansas Times, insisting that his wife had only been adding “Christian-related books as well as history, science and other books.”
“The point that she was trying to make is that she saw the Pride material in there,” he said, “As Christians, it would be a good opportunity that we too should be stocking those resources with Bibles, devotionals, things like that.”
He tried to make it sound like an act of civic virtue.
“In other words, we want to give people more choice, and I think everybody would agree that having more choice is a good thing.”
But that is not what Jennifer Meeks said in her post, as one local resident noted.
“Does she not know what ‘swapping out’ means?” asked Stephanie Vanderslice, the steward of the Little Free Library outside St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Conway, one of seven that appear in photos Meeks included in her post.
If people re worried about Pride books, thjey really won’t like some of the depraved stories in the Bible. Oof — it’s got some doozies.
Polling shows that over half of Republicans don’t approve of book banning (which this is, in small scale form.)
The NPR/Ipsos poll shows 51 percent of Republicans oppose state lawmakers passing laws to ban certain books and remove them from classrooms and libraries, including 31 percent who said they strongly oppose it. More than 45 percent also said they oppose individual school boards banning books.
Democrats and independents were even more opposed to book bans; About 85 percent of Democrats said they oppose bans from school boards and lawmakers, and about two-thirds of independents said the same.
It’s yet another unpopular far right “anti-woke” issue. But they just can’t help themselves.