What Missouri officials didn’t explain about an LGBTQ+ library story time

Denny Hoskins wants to cut a library’s funding over two books he has not read.

He Googled them, saw excerpts and looked at some pictures. For Missouri’s secretary of state, that was enough.

The books are “Rainbowsaurus,” the tale of a family searching for a rainbow dinosaur, and “Big Wig,” about a child who wins a costume contest in drag. Staff at a Columbia library read them aloud to toddlers and preschoolers during a “rainbow story time” attended by families who chose to be there.

The additional cost to Daniel Boone Regional Library for the event was $26 — $18 for a prop wig and $8 for contact paper. Everything else came from resources the public already owns.

When Hoskins learned of the event, he warned the library that if the “inappropriate endeavor” went forward, he would use his authority over the Missouri State Library to block every dollar of state and federal funding he could from future events.

The library read the books anyway.

Missouri Republicans threaten library funding over ‘rainbow story time’

And thus, a press conference was quickly convened.

Hoskins stood beside Rick Brattin, a state senator running for Congress, with a warning letter from Attorney General Catherine Hanaway providing the legal backdrop. Together, they brought the machinery of state government to bear on a Saturday morning story time for preschoolers.

The accusations were stark.

They described the story time as an effort to groom children. Hoskins called the event “unconscionable, if not criminal.”

But grooming is not even the standard in the criminal laws Hanaway cited in her letter to the library. The attorney general acknowledged the library’s right to determine its own programming and said she was prepared to act only if a program broke the law — pointing to statutes against giving minors pornography or displaying explicit sexual material in public.

So reporters asked Hoskins and Brattin the obvious question: Did these two books meet that bar?

Neither would say they did. Brattin argued the books carried “a message that’s meant to sexualize” and were intended to normalize a “lifestyle” and lower children’s defenses.

But the local prosecutor Hanaway copied on her letter to the library had already explained where the legal line lies. Roger Johnson, the Boone County prosecutor, told KOMU it is not a crime to talk about LGBTQ+ issues. The state laws concern depictions of sexual activity, not gender identity.

Told of the prosecutor’s view at the press conference, Hoskins responded that by that logic, “pornography is OK to be talked about because it’s a First Amendment right.”

If the story time is legal, he said, he will work with the legislature “to ensure this is illegal in the future.”

Politicians propose restrictions on legal conduct all the time. That’s not the notable part. The sequence is.

An attorney general’s warning, a secretary of state’s threat to the library’s funding and repeated accusations of grooming and criminality — all without anyone identifying conduct that violated the laws they invoked.

Tuesday’s press conference wasn’t an announcement that the library had violated the law. It was an announcement that officials wanted the law to prohibit what the library had done.

And rewriting the statute would not necessarily settle the matter. If government funding were withheld because officials objected to the viewpoint expressed in the library’s programming, that would raise a separate First Amendment question.

So here is where it stands.

Hoskins and Brattin have elected offices and the megaphone that comes with them. What they don’t have, at least according to the local prosecutor, is a crime.

The library’s side of the ledger is simpler.

Two books, one wig, some contact paper.

Twenty-six dollars.