September 24, 2022
Saturday

Severe measures require solid reasons and good intentions. A moment’s consideration shows that the advocates of Proposition 2 are deficient in both.

Mr. Harrington and company do not think the Drag Queen Story Hour hosted by the Ketchikan Public Library was appropriate for young children, fair enough. But the public library’s Drag Queen Story Hour was a purely voluntary event. Given this fact, I am 100% confident that no person who was morally opposed to the event took their children there. The event was also very forthright about its contents, right down to the name, so no one would have attended ignorantly nor accidently.

So the only children present were those that were brought to the library, willingly and knowingly, by their parents or with their parents’ permission. And presumably every parent whose children attended felt this event to be morally beneficial (or at the very least harmless) to their children’s education and development. Maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong, but every parent has the right to decide such questions themselves and teach their children what values they see fit.

Given the event was purely voluntary, how then could those opposed to the Drag Queen Story Hour have been remotely harmed by it as they and their children clearly did not attend? And lacking any such harm to their families, what justification is there for defunding the library for hosting it?

This absence of any identifiable harm to the backers of Proposition 2 lays bare the real target of Mr. Harrington and company’s wrath: the parents who are raising their children with moral values that Mr. Harrington and company disapprove of (namely gay and trans acceptance). Since they can’t strike at these objectionable parents directly, Mr. Harrington and company are going after our library in order to send a message and enact an indirect form of public censor.

This is not only vicious and authoritarian, but also wildly disproportionate and socially destructive. In the name of protecting some of Ketchikan’s children from the decisions made by their own parents, Mr. Harrington proposes defunding the library that all of our town’s children use. He wants to defund the library which our elementary, middle school, high school, and college students depend upon for their studies and homework. He wants to defund the library that our town’s youth use for constructive entertainment and self-enrichment. He wants to defund the library whose resources our town’s parents make use of in numerous ways for the betterment of their families. And all this, again, over a few people’s attendance of a purely voluntary event which Mr. Harrington disagreed with. This is the very definition of a “small-minded” proposal.

Hopefully a majority of us out-of-town residents will prove far more broad-minded than Mr. Harrington and company. Vote NO on Proposition 2.

Ghert Abbott,
North Point Higgins,

Ketchikan, Alaska

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Received September 24, 2022 - Published September 24, 2022

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