Challenges to Kentucky public library books soared by 1,061% last year, rising from 26 incidents in 2023 to 302 incidents in 2024, according to a recently released state report.

That eye-popping number is buried in small type at the bottom of page six of the annual Statistical Report of Kentucky Public Libraries, published in April by the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives.

The KDLA and its commissioner, State Librarian Denise Lyons, declined requests from the Herald-Leader to discuss the eruption in book challenges or provide a county-level breakdown to show where they arose most often. Lyons avoided the subject June 24 when she presented the report to a legislative committee in Frankfort.

In interviews, however, local librarians say they believe the majority of last year’s challenges occurred in just two counties — Daviess and Bourbon. Conservative protesters frequently targeted children’s and teens’ sections books on the subjects of human sexuality generally and LGBTQ+ themes specifically.

The counties responded very differently to the book challenges.

In Bourbon County, a local family with a few supporters protested 102 books over a roughly six-month period, said Mark Adler, director of the Paris-Bourbon County Public Library.

Adler said the community vocally united behind the library as it declared itself Kentucky’s first “sanctuary” library, or First Amendment library, which means it’s formally committed to defending freedom of expression and providing “a safe space for ideas.”

The Bourbon County Fiscal Court and Paris City Council passed resolutions endorsing the library’s new status.

Book challenges have stopped for now, Adler said.

“We’re basically drawing a line in the sand and saying the First Amendment is here for everybody,” Adler said. “We recognize there are materials on the shelf that might offend you. There are certainly things on the shelf that offend me. But that doesn’t give me the right to have them removed.”

‘It’s just total chaos’

In Daviess County, however, advocacy groups continue to fight bitterly over the library’s contents as well as control of its five-member governing board, which is now appointed by the county judge-executive.

The chairwoman’s seat, scheduled to come open in September, could flip the board’s majority over to the library’s critics, who want new restrictions put in place over materials available to minors.

Opponents of the library also have gone to the state legislature with proposals to give county politicians more authority over how libraries are run statewide, continuing to strip them of the relative self-governing autonomy most enjoyed until recent years. The state senator from Daviess County, Republican Gary Boswell, sponsored the latest library board bill in the 2025 General Assembly, although it fell short of final passage.

And the opponents filed an obscenity complaint against the library with Daviess County Attorney John Burlew. The prosecutor sent a letter to the library board on Dec. 13, 2023, advising it that “some of the literature I reviewed” could, in fact, violate Kentucky’s obscenity statute, although he expressed no interest in pursuing a case.

“I am not sure that the legislature envisioned public libraries when the obscenity statutes were written,” Burlew wrote to the library board. “I would guess the target was, rather, businesses or other entities.”

“While being mindful of free speech rights,” he added “I cannot imagine the legislature intended to grant public libraries an exception, so to speak, regarding minors viewing obscene material. I would not want an unwilling or unknowing minor to stumble upon sexually explicit material, unwittingly, while at the public library. It is my hope that the library and the complainant will arrive at a reasonable compromise in this matter.”

Advocates on both sides in Daviess County say they get yelled at and insulted for taking a stand in the debate over the public library’s fate.

“If you came to a library board meeting, you would be shocked. It’s just chaos. Every month, it’s just total chaos,” said Cheryl Brown of the Coalition for an Inclusive Daviess County, which supports the library and argues against censorship. “And these are meetings that used to be boring. They’re supposed to be boring.”

“They call us homophobes and racists and Nazis, and nothing could be further from the truth, but that’s the kind of vitriol that that happens anytime we make an objection,” said Jerry Chapman of Daviess County Citizens for Decency, which has demanded changes at the library. “It’s just this childish name-calling.”

Protect the children

Chapman’s group began in 2023 by protesting drag shows at the RiverPark Center, a publicly funded venue in Owensboro. It went on to conduct “audits” that identified hundreds of books it found objectionable in Daviess County school libraries and the Daviess County Public Library.

The group focused on what it calls pornography.

For instance, in the teens section of the public library, the group found copies of "All Boys Aren’t Blue," a memoir by journalist George M. Johnson about growing up as a gay Black man. That book has graphic descriptions of sex, Citizens for Decency said, citing an online description by conservative rating website booklooks.org.

"All Boys Aren’t Blue" was the most frequently challenged book in school and public libraries across the United States last year, of the 2,452 unique titles targeted, according to the American Library Association.

Overall, the ALA said, 2024 saw the third-highest number of library book challenges documented by the group since at least 2001. Politically powerful activist groups like Moms for Liberty have established chapters nationwide to fight what they call “woke indoctrination” of children by schools and libraries.

Many other public library books identified by Daviess County Citizens for Decency also contain explicit sex scenes, but they are available to any minor browsing the teens section, Chapman said. The library should shelve racier books in the adults section so parents can keep their kids physically separated from them, he said.

“The motivation is simple: We want to protect children,” Chapman said.

“It’s irrefutable the damage that — and some people object to this word, but it fits— pornography damages young minds,” he said. “The human brain is not fully developed until right around the age of 25 years old. If we’re feeding pornography to 12-, 13-, 14-year-old children, we’re creating a generation of damaged people.”

Using internal documents obtained through the Kentucky Open Records Act, the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer last year revealed that the Daviess County school district quietly cooperated with Citizens for Decency.

Daviess County schools culled a “handful” of books from library shelves, and school leaders agreed to review others for their appropriateness, including Kurt Vonnegut’s celebrated anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five, the newspaper reported. That book contains criticism of Christianity and descriptions of violence, among its other flaws, according to Citizens for Decency’s link to booklook.org.

A librarian resists

Daviess County Public Library Director Erin Waller was less willing to acquiesce when Citizens for Decency presented its demands to her.

“They brought us a binder of over 250 titles that they had found in our catalog by using a list created by a national organization,” Waller told the Herald-Leader. “This is not stuff they stumbled upon, not stuff their children found.”

“It went from board books for babies all the way up through books in our young adult section, and they had a variety of different topics,” Waller said. “We’re talking about race, gender, identity, sexuality, anatomy books, just stuff like that. And their request was that these books be moved to the adult section immediately, and that I be fired because I purchased these books for the library.”

Waller said she pulled the challenged titles into her office and carefully reviewed them over several months. She decided to move a few books by fantasy author Sarah J. Maas from the teens section to the adults section, where other Maas books already were kept.

“But the majority of them — I would say 98% of them — actually more than that, probably 99% of them — we said we’re going to keep them where they are,” Waller said.

That didn’t end the debate, though, she said. Following the established protocol, Citizens for Decency has been appealing Waller’s decisions to a library review committee and then upward to the library board itself.

“This latest one, the board voted 3-to-2 to move a book to the parenting collection,” she said. “So it’s looking like things are going to start moving, potentially, depending on what happens with my board members.”

Deciding for everyone else

The Daviess County Public Library did make two policy changes.

It renamed its teens section the “young adults” section to more clearly define the expected maturity level of that readership.

And it created a more restrictive library card for teens, if parents choose, that would limit them to checking out books from the children’s section, which serves kids up to age 12. Few families have expressed interest in getting this new type of library card, Waller acknowledged.

Chapman said he wasn’t impressed by the new “young adults” label, and he dismissed the idea of a children’s library card for teenagers.

“So if you don’t like the porn in in the teen section, we’re going to restrict you to pop-up books,” he said. “Now, that seems heavy-handed to me.”

The problem with Citizens for Decency is that it wants to impose its political and religious views on an entire community that shares a public library, rather than deciding what its own kids can check out, said Brown of the Coalition for an Inclusive Daviess County.

“There’s a lot of Scripture verses read at our library board meetings these days. There’s a lot of use of the words ‘obscenity’ and ‘pornography,’” Brown said.

“A common theme is they have lots of children and they can’t keep up with them, and they’re afraid the kids will come across a book they don’t want them to see in the children’s section,” she said. “But the response to that is, the library people aren’t there to babysit your children. It’s your responsibility to watch and see what your children are looking at and make sure it’s not something you wouldn’t approve of.”

Books that candidly discuss sexuality or race might shock some adults, Brown said. But they can be a lifeline for teenagers who want to learn about someone else experiencing the same feelings they have, she said.

“A lot of those kids, they start questioning things in puberty, and they need to have resources to understand what they’re going through,” Brown said. “Not all of them are comfortable speaking to their parents about issues when they’re going through that type of thing. And so those are resources that they need to be able to access in the young adult section of their local library.”

‘A pretty dangerous time’

Both sides in the Daviess County debate say they won’t be surprised if other Kentucky communities soon are caught up in their own book battles.

“This is a problem that’s statewide,” Chapman said. “I’ve gotten calls from all over. I just had a conversation with a group in Hodgenville, day before yesterday, they’re fighting it, too. Marshall County. Bowling Green. Covington. I get at least a call a week from all over the country. ‘What do we do? How do we fix this?’”

Back in Bourbon County, Adler, the public library director, said he was grateful to have community support when he faced a long list of book challenges. But he doesn’t believe the fight is over.

“I think we’re probably in a pretty dangerous time right now, because if the reports I’m reading are right, it’s becoming far more underscored and supported by large money from organizations that have a link to politics. I think they have a political agenda to run,” Adler said.

“For any people in our country to be stripped of our access and our ability to make the basic decisions for ourselves of what to think and what to read, I mean, that would be a pretty terrifying country to live in,” he said. “That form of authoritarianism is something I’ve never personally dealt with or seen.”

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