Letter to the Editor by Suzanne Kearney of Post Falls
The innocence of a child is like a rose: beautiful, delicate, and short-lived. When that innocence is shattered, it cannot be restored. It will rot and emit a stench.
Be warned: trustee candidate Michelle Lippert claims to support children while disavowing the very policies that protect them. In her “Let Them Read” opinion published in Kootenai Journal, she said raising responsible adults is a process that is “led by parents.” If she believes this, why does she protest current policy, in which explicit materials may only be checked out by parents? Minors are free to browse titles online and have any book they want accessed by their parents. In what way is this not quote “letting them read”?
The implication in Lippert’s piece is that parents who want this absolute guarantee of control are narrow-minded and not raising their kids to be mature, autonomous adults, when the opposite is true. How and when a child learns about sexuality should be directed solely by parents, not stumbled upon, or set out as a temptation on display. Why the hurry to have children introduced to mature topics, at the initiation of the library, instead of at the timing of parents? When they turn 18, they can check out whatever they want. The only reason for the rush is to mold impressionable minds, which should be the right of the parents alone.
I accompany my kids on every library visit, read to them regularly, and homeschool, and they have still stumbled on sexual content. When they do, they know to come ask me about it, and we talk. But it wasn’t on my timing.
A 2025 poll by Idaho Family Policy Center found that 71% of Idahoans support HB710, which requires community libraries to protect children from explicit materials. The sample set for this statistic was from a demographic of only 55% self-reporting as “conservative.” This is not a small minority of “extremists” as some may say.
Unresolved conflict requires negotiation. The current policies are a compromise that keeps minors from stumbling on explicit content by accident, while still allowing complete and full access with parental consent. This is not a violation of parental rights; in fact, quite the opposite. If you are with the majority of our state, and agree that this is common sense and not “right wing extremism,” I encourage you to vote for CLN candidate Victoria Bauman on Tuesday. Victoria is a mom committed to following the law and upholding policies that keep our libraries thriving. Victoria will give parents the assurance that every trip to the library will be full of discovery—the good kind.
