Idaho library election results are in. For the most part, freedom prevailed | Opinion

Tuesday was a good day for freedom in Idaho.

In almost all cases, the forces of censorship — far-right candidates who’ve attempted to take over local library boards — took a thumping. Candidates who pledged that public libraries would remain places of free intellectual inquiry triumphed.

Perhaps the most hotly contested races were in Meridian, where there have been efforts to simply disband the district because the library has sex education books and books that make reference to the lives of gay people. Incumbent Destinie Hart, who has pledged to protect free expression, beat challenger Xavier Torres, who had signed the petition to disband the district, by more than a two-to-one margin. The results were essentially identical in the race between incumbent Josh Cummings and challenger David J. Tizekker.

The pattern repeated at the Ada Community Library board, where anti-censorship candidates Mary Anne Saunders and Sandra Taylor prevailed over candidates who had pledged to govern the library according to conservative ideology.

And the trend of anti-censorship voting held up not just in the Treasure Valley but across much of the state. From North Idaho to eastern Idaho, library trustees committed to freedom generally prevailed.

The one exception was in Kootenai County, where pro-censorship challengers Tom Hanley and Tim Plass defeated incumbents Regina McCrea and Judy Meyer.

Hanley built his campaign on a lie. He pledged to “protect children from the hardcore pornography that is available to children in our libraries,” as the Coeur d’Alene Press reported.

The assertions that libraries are full of porn and inappropriate material are ludicrous. But you can expect Hanley to call books he doesn’t like pornography for the purposes of censoring them.

Kootenai County — home to perhaps the most extreme faction of the Idaho Republican Party, which has increasingly been willing to link arms with characters like David Reilly — is increasingly a pocket where censorship and indoctrination are advancing as freedom recedes.

Reilly has made shocking antisemitic statements, including “Judaism is the religion of anti-Christ.”

Reilly resigned from his job as a radio host in Pennsylvania after his supportive tweets and footage of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, became public, as the Daily News of Newburyport reported. As the Inlander subsequently reported, four days before the rally, a user later identified in court testimony as Reilly suggested the idea that participants “march straight through the commons with torches for the night rally” for the purpose of producing propaganda footage. The footage Reilly posted after the rally, with advertisements for another rally the following day, was exactly the kind of propaganda footage discussed in the post.

First, they took over the community college, which is now a shambles, and now the library, which may soon follow.

But the damage has largely been contained to Kootenai. And, given the incessant calls for censorship, calls that became one of the central themes of the last two legislative sessions, that’s reason to celebrate.

This story was originally published May 17, 2023 at 11:12 AM.