Missouri Rep. Whick Thomas, a Democrat, held a press conference about the state’s attacks on a Rainbow Story Time event at a local library. Image courtesy of Missouri House of Communications.
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A Missouri library refused to back down from hosting an LGBTQ children’s book event, even as the state threatened to cut its funding or potentially levy criminal charges.
Last week, Missouri’s Attorney General and its Secretary of State, both Republicans, launched a full-fledged attack on the Daniel Boone Regional Library in Columbia. According to conservatives, the library’s planned Rainbow Story Time event—a children’s event meant for LGBTQ families and their allies—was nothing less than an “attempt to mold and manipulate innocent young minds with radical liberal ideology,” reads a public letter from Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ office.
He called Rainbowsaurus, a book featuring same-sex parents chasing a rainbow dinosaur, and Big Wig, which is about gender non-conforming kids playing dress-up, “a form of sexual grooming [that] is unconscionable, if not criminal.”
But the letter was more than your typical conservative pearl-clutching. It was a threat. The AG’s office sent a letter citing criminal penalties against those who are “furnishing any material pornographic to minors.”
Meanwhile, Hoskins wrote: “Please be advised if this inappropriate endeavor for children takes place, I will do everything in my power to block every dollar of state and federal funding one can from future events at the Daniel Boone Library System.”
Nevertheless, the children read.
“We never wavered from holding Rainbow Story Time as planned,” said Mitzi St. John, a library spokesperson, to Erin in the Morning. “We weren’t doing anything illegal.”
Yesterday, Hoskins joined Republican State Senator Rick Brattin for a press conference on the matter, announcing they would be attempting to launch an investigation into the library. Brattin does not represent the area that the Daniel Boone Regional Library serves, but he is running for Congress, and Missouri primaries are next week. The seat he’s seeking also does not cover the community DBRL serves.
“They need something to stay in the headlines,” said Rep. Wick Thomas, a Democrat and former librarian, in a speech to reporters. The state’s only nonbinary legislator drove two hours when they heard about Hoskins’ press conference to host a counter-event of their own. “This is all they’ve got.”
These kinds of manufactured moral panics have become a common playbook by the right. In fact, Project 2025 explicitly calls for classifying “transgender ideology” as pornographic so that it can repress trans expression—and then some. The far-right blueprint says that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
Though it sounds extreme, many of Project 2025’s proposals have already come to fruition. Across the country, state and federal lawmakers have made it virtually illegal for trans and gender nonconforming people to simply exist in public—banning them from bathrooms, sports, the military, and, of course, library shelves.
During Hoskins’ event, they repeatedly—and without citing sources—argued the majority of Missourians opposed the Rainbow Story Time. But if there was community concern or opposition, Mary Lamberton—a grandmother, Columbia resident, and retired public school secretary—didn’t see much of it. There were maybe one or two protestors who came the day of the event and stood outside, she told Erin in the Morning.
Inside the library, roughly 150 people crammed in. Overflow crowds spilled out from the reading room and into the commons. It was a “positive atmosphere,” she said. She attended Rainbow Story Time as an ally; her niece is transgender.
Even in the face of funding cuts to her community library, for Lamberton, capitulation was not an option. “Immediately backing down, as a strategy, that will not get us ahead,” she told Erin in the Morning.
Meanwhile, at yesterday’s Republican presser, Brattin and Hoskins compared same-sex parents to parents who show their children pornography. When pressed, Brattin also conceded he hadn’t read the books in question, because he didn’t want to “spend money” on it, but that he had “Googled it,” which was enough to tell it was pornographic.
Immediately after that press conference wrapped up, Rep. Wick Thomas—a nonbinary legislator who had also attended Rainbow Story Time—held their own press conference, deciding at the last minute to drive over two hours to be in Jefferson City that day. As a former librarian, they told the press gaggle they felt compelled to be a counterweight to Hoskins and Brattin’s twenty-minute anti-trans tirade. In Thomas’ hands as they spoke were copies of Rainbowsaurus and Big Wig, borrowed from the local library.
They spoke to Erin in the Morning for an interview shortly thereafter. “This isn’t isolated to Missouri,” Thomas said. “It doesn’t end here if we don’t stop it here.”
Conservatives’ Rainbow Story Time spectacle is merely part of a broader effort to censor LGBTQ content and suppress the existence of LGBTQ people, they said. “That is a very dangerous slope into authoritarianism.”
Colbey Stosberg, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office—which had issued the initial public letter about Rainbow Story Time—rejected characterizations that this constituted discrimination against LGBTQ people and families.
“We’re not intending to discriminate based off of what sexual orientation is being furnished to minors. It’s any and all sexually explicit content,” he said in an interview with a local TV station. “That’s the way the law reads, and we’re enforcing it.”
“If anybody can find any library that’s furnishing, you know, heterosexual explicit content towards minors, call our office, please,” he said.
Many Missourians aren’t buying it.
“Public libraries exist to educate, foster curiosity, and serve their communities,” the statewide LGBTQ advocacy group PROMO told Erin in the Morning in a statement.
“Librarians, not politicians, are best equipped to determine what programming reflects those needs.”
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