The group was recently awarded $70,000 after being removed from the library in August 2023
By HANNAH SCHRADER — city@theaggie.org
In a recent lawsuit settlement with Yolo County, conservative organization Moms for Liberty was awarded $70,000 and a change in library policy. The lawsuit was originally brought about after the library’s regional manager, Scott Love, removed the group from the Mary L. Stephens library in August 2023.
Love removed the group due to a speaker’s misgendering of transgender individuals during their forum in the library. However, the new library policy prohibits staff from interrupting meetings based on the content of the speech.
On Aug. 20, 2023, the Yolo County chapter of Moms for Liberty held a meeting at the Mary L. Stephens library for the first time, according to Beth Bourne, the chair of the Yolo County chapter. The group reserved a meeting room to hold a forum to discuss protecting girls’ sports in California.
This forum, called the Forum on Fair and Safe Sports for Girls, consisted of a panel of anti-trans activists who spoke on the importance of protecting girls’ sports. The speakers began to misgender transgender people, and Love shut off the projector and asked the organization to leave.
Bourne discussed the sequence of events that resulted in the group’s removal from the library.
“We were told by the librarian — he actually said before we even started the event — that there was a state policy or state law that said we would not be allowed to misgender anybody,” Bourne said. “We said before we started, ‘That’s not really true, there is no state law that says you have to use a certain kind of speech.’ And then, as we started our talk again, he interrupted us and said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to misgender [anyone]. Transwomen are women.’”
Bourne then discussed the challenges the organization faced when pursuing the lawsuit.
“I think the hardest thing for me was the timing,” Bourne said. “I was told that it’ll be a few months before we actually would take it to the federal district court — I don’t remember which circuit it is, but it’s in the press release. But I was like, ‘Why can’t we do something this month? Why do we have to wait until, you know, February or March?’ To me it was like, I don’t have time, I want people in Davis and Yolo County to know the truth. And the truth is, girls are being impacted by sports, and we’re being silenced for having a different viewpoint.”
Bourne spoke about the difficulties of expressing viewpoints that oppose the majority opinion.
“We’re in a blue city and a blue state with a blue government,” Bourne said. “And so maybe what I’m saying isn’t what is popular in the Democratic Party right now, even though I don’t think this should even be a political issue. It should just be an issue about protecting girls and protecting children and protecting reality.”
Bourne then used an analogy to urge others to try to understand her position from the minority viewpoint.
“Let’s say you were living in, you know, Nashville, Tennessee, or I don’t know, some red city in a red state, and your views were like, ‘I want to protect trans children and trans medicine,’” Bourne said. “And then your librarian said, ‘No, you can’t talk about that.’ So you just have to put yourself in another situation.”
Chair of the Davis Phoenix Coalition Anoosh Jorjorian provided a response to the recent settlement.
“We were saddened that Moms for Liberty’s bad behavior resulted in these kinds of costs to our county,” Jorjorian said. “We recognize that the library has been put in a really difficult position of, on the one hand, needing to be a forum for free speech, and on the other hand, being forced to allow speech that is harmful and can be threatening to people who patron that library.”
Jorjorian then talked about the harmful implications of this settlement on people in marginalized communities.
“Children who are bullied have frequently sought out libraries as a safe place where they can avoid a lot of the kinds of bullying and hate speech that they are subjected to at school or just out in the community,” Jorjorian said. “Decisions like this one really threaten the library’s role as that safe place and infringes on their [duty] to be a place for all community members.”
Jorjorian discussed the broader LGBTQ+ sentiment in response to the changes brought about by this lawsuit settlement.
“I do think I speak for a lot of members of the community in how frustrated we are that Moms for Liberty [claims] to be fighting for the liberty of all, and yet their actions are consistently benefiting just themselves and harming the community at large,” Jorjorian said. “Especially when they are such a minority in this community, and their actions have negatively affected so many.”
Written by: Hannah Schrader — city@theaggie.org
