Mary in the Library may not have the same recognition as Moms for Liberty, but parents in the Facebook group and other state-focused online communities have the same goal in mind: Getting sexually explicit books out of school libraries and away from kids.
Chalkboard News spoke with Brooke Stephens, a Utah parent and grassroots activist who is behind some of the loosely connected social media pages with members who share information about what is inside books, where they have been located and strategies for challenging them.
For Stephens and other parents in the groups, removing books with sexually explicit content is their chief concern because they don’t want their children interacting with material that posits different values than what they are taught at home.
Stephens also says the argument that efforts to remove books are rooted in racism or homophobia doesn’t make sense given the work done by parents to categorize the books by topics.
