In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or more unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in America.

Alexis de Tocqueville

During a February visit to Samuel’s Public Library in Front Royal, Virginia, a four-year-old boy picked out a book. The disturbing material in the selection launched a battle over what many in the Front Royal community rightfully deemed “publicly funded pornography.” Only a few short months later, the people of Warren County would successfully lobby the Board of Supervisors to temporarily restrict 75 percent of the over one-million-dollar library budget.

Following the initial incident, a comprehensive list was compiled revealing a host of titles featuring sexually explicit material available to minors at Samuel’s. Concerned parents and conscientious residents of Warren County complained to the library, going through the formal channels to file hundreds of “Request for Reconsideration” forms. One particular request asked for the removal of This is Why They Hate Us, a recently published book from the Young Adults section that is littered with sexual imagery, including a graphic depiction of an underaged boy engaging in oral sex with the main character—another underaged boy.

Rather than promptly granting the request, the library director responded with a letter informing the complainant that a staff review concluded the title in question met the requirements of the library’s “Collection Development Policy,” a policy that incorporates the American Library Association’s “Bill of Rights” and its corresponding interpretation for minors.

“Libraries and their governing bodies cannot assume the role of parents or the functions of parental authority in the private relationship between parent and child,” the letter cites from the ALA. The director’s response also highlighted the book’s glowing reviews from media and “professional journals,” concluding that “while the content might not be suitable for every person in the publisher’s recommended age group, it is the parent’s responsibility to determine which materials best fit the needs of their individual child.” Over a hundred additional titles are still currently under internal review at Samuel’s.

A non-profit corporation headquartered in Chicago, an organization with a multimillion-dollar budget, is influencing policy on the books children can read in a rural Virginia town of 15,000 people. With bills to pay and jobs to do, many working families—people often ill-versed in the bureaucratic lexicon and poorly equipped for procedural contest—would simply be sidelined by Samuel’s bureaucratic obstruction. Indeed, much of the economic and cultural hegemony enjoyed by today’s managerial elite rests on the lack of time and organizational resources at the disposal of the dominated.

As David Hines has documented in the pages of this magazine, there is a wide gap in the competence of pressure campaigns on the left and the right:

Lefty strategic research, especially on large and complicated targets, is done mostly by people with training, practice, and the support to do it for a living. Meaning, people who work in particular jobs at nonprofits or labor unions. Righties don’t have training in the skills, so don’t get practice, and building the infrastructure for it isn’t the kind of thing that the Righty grassroots think about or that Righty donors fund. But we could change that, and it would be a welcome start.

The people of Front Royal understand this, and their fight is the foundation for course correction.

This week I ventured beyond the borders of the Imperial City, past the Beltway, and west on Interstate 66. Traffic and ozone-polluted air gave way to the sublimity of the Shenandoah mountains. What I found in Front Royal, Virginia, was a place and a people with more political tact, courage, and moral coherence than what can be found in many a congressional committee, think tank, or executive department.

Although operating under the name “Samuel’s Public Library,” the entity is actually a legally registered non-profit, Samuel’s Library, Inc., equipped with its own internally elected Board of Trustees—despite receiving over 80 percent of its funding from the taxpaying citizens of Warren County. Following the apparent unwillingness of the library to take seriously the community’s concerns, the people of Front Royal did what any good public pressure campaign does: go for the money and make it more expensive to ignore communal demands than concede to them.

Hundreds gathered at the Warren County Government Center for the public hearing on the budget for the next fiscal year on June 6. In a room packed to the legal limit, mothers and fathers, articulate and impassioned, lined up to demand that library funding be withheld until books containing sexual references and other material inappropriate for children were removed. Then, the community waited in suspense for the official vote on the budget, scheduled for a week later on June 13.

I arrived ten minutes before the meeting to a packed parking lot and made my way to a chair in the back of a room of about a hundred people—almost all there in support of the initiative to clean up Samuel’s. Before voting on the budget the board called for a closed session, giving me time in the suspenseful interim to speak with Front Royal resident Dale Carpenter, a member of the Shenandoah Christian Alliance. “What we’re seeing here right now, I think, is a microcosm of what is going on across the country,” he told me. Unfazed by hysteria about violating public neutrality, Carpenter noted that “they say you can’t legislate morality but they’re legislating immorality.”

During our wait, another local, community organizer Thomas Hinnant laid it out in no uncertain terms: “We are not libertarians.” Insisting that the grassroots effort in Warren County not be co-opted by “budget hawks,” he stressed the community’s desire to “build public institutions.” The board soon returned and voted four to one in favor of restricting 75 percent of the Samuel’s budget until September, leaving time to discuss with the library how to handle the controversial books. Even after the victorious ruling, some residents expressed regret, noting they would have liked to increase library funding, but their hand had been forced out of a need to protect their children. As Hinnant later explained it to me, “‘Clean Up Samuel’s’ can more properly be identified as a rural decolonization effort than a movement interested in stoking culture wars.”

After the vote, one young mother clarified why the community has a shared stake in holding the library accountable: “A society’s whole purpose is to raise a family and to enable the raising of a family.… Just as there’s physical danger, there are also psychological and spiritual dangers,” she explained, rejecting the “helicopter mom” view of parenting that demands each parent privately inspect each book to be potentially read by their child.

Tom McFadden, a local father of eleven and candidate for the school board, stressed that obscenity in the library is not guarded by the First Amendment, adding, “we don’t have strip clubs in Front Royal. We don’t have gambling places. There’s other things we don’t have, because it goes against the community standards of Warren County.”

John Massoud, a first district candidate for the Virginia State Senate, echoed McFadden’s communitarian sentiment, pledging to reform current Virginia policy on school libraries, arguing, “under no circumstances should porn be shown to children and to have the government allow it or to fund something is basically government saying: ‘We approve of this.’”

After the budget vote, I joined some of the men in attendance that evening at PaveMint Smokin' Taphouse. Amid stout floats and tobacco smoke it became increasingly clear what enabled their success. Some were small business owners, others worked white collar jobs, yet a majority of them still raised their own chickens. Almost all had a number of kids well above the national average. Most were educated (many at nearby Christendom College) and almost all were drawn to either stay or come to Front Royal because of the allure of intentional and religiously sincere community.

Subscribe Today

Get daily emails in your inbox

Email Address:

They had the financial means and social capital to wage a battle that many communities lose by default because they simply lack the stability to do so. Hinnant broke down the road map for victory:

This is an overwhelmingly conservative area, and it is a great example of what can be done when the people exert their will in an organized fashion against unelected bureaucrats. We took the time to follow every procedure. We filled out hundreds of forms, appealed everything that was denied. I think we filled out 500 requests for reconsideration, give or take. We used their own rules against them, clogged the machine, and they didn’t know what to do. Then we had more folks at the meeting, and we won.

Washington, D.C., is where the action is. The movers and shakers congregate in the capital to impress upon the country that change that can only be implemented there. Undoubtedly, the country’s elites have failed us and must be replaced, and such efforts require virtuous, competent people in Washington. But what the recent victory in Warren County shows is that the real front lines of American politics are often in towns like Front Royal, Virginia.