Book-banning fanatic assaults opponent. She’s demanding an X-rated section in the library.

Author: Greg Owen

In a Louisiana parish near New Orleans, one woman has been responsible for the removal of nearly 200 books from shelves at the local library, where she and her cohorts in a book-banning club have demanded an X-rated section be established to house any books in the library’s collection they deem sexually explicit.

Phillips has been on a book-banning spree since last November, when she and fellow members of the St. Tammany Parish Library Accountability Project, which Phillips created with her husband, began filing “statements of concern” with the local library.

Over 215 complaints have been filed by the group. One hundred seventy-two books have been removed from library shelves while staff assess the books’ sexual content.

According to residents, the books align with a list of titles targeted for censorship by far-right groups like Moms for Liberty, which has relied on the website BookLooks.org  to single out “offensive” texts in library purges across the country. The site was launched in Florida by Moms for Liberty member Emily Maikisch in 2022.

Opponents of Phillip’s book-banning campaign say the titles her group targeted weren’t even checked out to read by those lodging the complaints.

Phillip’s manic censorship effort has embroiled the parish in turmoil.

Tensions were high at a special meeting of the St. Tammany Parish Council on Tuesday night, which brought out over a hundred residents in opposition and support of Phillips’ crusade.

“Lord, we always come to you and ask that we can be better than we are,” the councilman leading the meeting’s invocation acknowledged. “And this is a pretty good time for us to ask you that now.”

The councilman’s call for patience and kindness was lost on Phillips, whose violent actions outside the meeting have led to calls for banning her from future council meetings. The victim hasn’t said if she’ll press charges.

On Reddit, an intrepid user has summarized the cost of Phillips’ and the St. Tammany Parish Library Accountability Project’s cost to taxpayers.

“Over $72,000 of library funds were wasted processing book challenges, of which 81% were filed by one person — Connie Phillips,” reads the infographic from NorthshoreLA.

Titles removed for review are only accessible with a special request to library staff. Only 10% of books removed from shelves this year have been reviewed by staff.

Phillips and her group are demanding a special “sexually explicit” section be created in the library to house books they consider inappropriate, even for adults.

Titles include Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas, and the YA series You by Caroline Kepnes.

Phillips began her book-banning crusade last November with a public records request seeking email and text exchanges with the St. Tammany Parish library director containing keywords including Pride, Pride Display, opposition, strategy, compromise, pornography, and pedophilia.

Actual Story on LGBTQ Nation
Author: Greg Owen