A Christian mom who tried to ban LGBTQ books just got arrested for kidnapping her own daughter

From censoring LGBTQ books to staging a kidnapping, Tammi Hamby’s crusade shows how Christian Nationalist power harms the very communities it claims to protect

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This is a wild story that I SWEAR is going somewhere. Bear with me.

Part 1

Last month, a 22-year-old woman with intellectual disabilities was kidnapped in Crawford County, Arkansas. Two men arrived at her home wearing ski masks, abducted the poor woman, and drove her to an empty field. They tied her to a tree—but she managed to escape, only to have the same men re-capture her and re-tie her to the tree.

She escaped once again and found a way to call 911. When law enforcement soon came to her rescue, one officer later said the woman “was in fear for her life and clung tightly to a teddy bear the entirety of me speaking with her during her interview.”

Part 2

Cops quickly learned that this was all an act… and that the woman’s mother, Tammi Hamby, was the ringleader. She’s the one who staged the entire kidnapping and hired those men to do it. She was even present when her daughter, who was adopted when she was six weeks old, was tied to that tree.

According to an arrest warrant for Hamby, she was just trying to teach her daughter a lesson. Hamby explained that the young woman had started talking to strangers online, including someone who pretended to be country music singer Luke Bryan. Despite pleading with the daughter not to speak to strangers, she kept doing it, so Hamby figured she could scare her into obedience. She got in touch with Shannon Yazmin Yvonne Childers, the in-home nursing assistant who helped care for the young woman, and Childers recruited the two other men, David Qbao and Nico Austria.

The suspects in the kidnapping (screenshot via 5NEWS)

Arrest documents said the plan was to have someone pretend to be associated with Luke Bryan and communicate with Hamby’s daughter to coordinate a meet up.

The plan was then to have the person pick Hamby’s daughter up, take her to a field up the road, and demand money before tying her to a tree. The warrant says then, Hamby was set to show up and “rescue her.”

…

Austria reportedly took a wrong turn and ended up in the wrong field, the warrant said. Hamby’s daughter was zip tied and tied to a tree.

Reporter Penny Weaver of the River Valley Democrat-Gazette added more details (behind a paywall):

On Nov. 17, Nico lured [the young woman] from her home… by telling her he was with Luke Bryan and promising she could meet the country star. Quach hid in the trunk wearing a ski mask as they drove. Nico pulled into a field, let Quach out of the trunk, donned a ski mask and both men demanded money from [the young woman]. When she said she had no money, the men pulled her from the car.

Somehow, all the adults involved in this debacle made the worst possible decisions every step of the way. That’s why they’ve now been arrested and face kidnapping charges.

Interestingly enough, the same day Hamby was arrested, her husband Jeffrey Hamby spoke with 5NEWS and defended what his wife did.

He said their daughter had been talking to (the fake) Luke Bryan for months, that the predator’s number was traced back to Nigeria, but that the police refused to take any action. (The Crawford County prosecutor told the news outlet that they didn’t have enough information to take action and that the parents should have taken more responsibility: “I mean, this is a special needs girl who if there’s issues with the internet, then you just cut her off from the internet.”)

Because Tammi Hamby felt there were no other options, she staged the “kidnapping” on November 17.

Her husband is now acting like they’re the victims in all this:

Jeffrey Hamby (screenshot via 5NEWS)

“Now DHS has taken my daughter from me, and my wife is arrested for trying to do the right thing, for trying to save my daughter, who has never known evil, has been sheltered all of her life, and we couldn’t talk her into understanding that danger existed, and so we wanted to show her that evil does exist, and now she’s in DHS custody, and my wife is facing jail time.”

Jeffrey admitted that the plot was “ill-conceived” and “really poorly executed,” noting that the bruising his daughter got from the zip ties was accidental, and that a practice run of the kidnapping was conducted to try to keep things like that from happening.

“They had practiced earlier that day with these zip ties to leave them loose so she can slip them off. Instead, in the struggle to get away, she tightened the zip ties, and it bruised her wrists,” Jeffrey said.

Jeffrey ended the interview by imploring that Tammi was never planning to harm their daughter, and that he “hates that she’s being disparaged like this.”

What have we learned from all this so far? That these parents, who insisted on disciplining their daughter by staging a pretend-kidnapping and forever traumatizing her, have no business taking care of children since their own moral compass is completely broken.

Part 3

All of that would be messed up on its own. What makes this story even more absurd, though, is that Jeffrey and Tammi Hamby have a long history of pretending to protect children from the scourge of… LGBTQ people.

Tammi Hamby (screenshot via YouTube)

All of this began in late 2022. According to one lawsuit, Hamby was a member of the Crawford County Quorum Court—a 13-member body that had the power to withhold funding from the library system—and she wrote a letter to the library board and the quorum court demanding that the library segregate those books. She specifically cited the harm not doing that would cause children.

We are concerned about the agenda that is being pushed by the Van Buren Public Library, aiming education of alternative lifestyles to prepubescent children. We have friends and employees that choose to live alternative lifestyles that we love dearly. We do not agree with that lifestyle but acknowledge their right to live the way they choose to live. We are not trying to infringe on those rights in any way. Our issue is with the constitutional rights of parents and our religious liberties being infringed upon by this progressive woke ideology normalizing and equating homosexual and transsexual lifestyles with heterosexual family units. And doing this without parental consent or the ability to opt out.

They have purchased, with taxpayer money, several books about alternative lifestyles that are aimed at prepubescent children. Some of these books are available in board book form which tells you the age they are targeting. (Book titles are included with this letter) Then they made a public display in the front of the library with these books. This represents an agenda to indoctrinate our community but especially our children with this content. The statement was made at the recent library meeting that the Crawford County area was the least educated area in the state concerning alternative lifestyles and that needed to be changed. They intend to start with our children.

Parents should be allowed to educate their children as they see fit on ideas and beliefs about sexuality. Efforts to expose children to age-inappropriate content and make parental notification and opt-out difficult or impossible undermine parents’ constitutional right to control their children’s education on sensitive topics such as human sexuality. Public libraries should not become a place where children are exposed to radical sexual ideology.

The increased prevalence of transgender ideology in culture and education has narrowed the treatment options for children with gender dysphoria. If normalized, then a true gender dysphoric pubertal or pre-pubertal child cannot seek appropriate therapy to correct this aberrant behavior.

Exposing our pre-pubertal children to colorful picture books equating homosexual and transsexual behavior to and as normal as heterosexual parenting without the consent of the parents, subverts our God given rights as parents and discriminates against us based for our religious beliefs.

Our parental rights and religious liberties are being subverted by a progressive woke ideology driven by the library director and her employees. Many professionals would still consider this behavior child abuse! And this board-certified Family physician in this community for over 25 years is one of them. Case law in Arkansans would also support our legal right to remove those people who desire to sexualize our children. Basically, in Arkansas you as a JP Board and County Judge are responsible for hiring people to represent the values of our community. These books are not required to be purchased by the library. The books in our library are purchased at the director’s discretion. Combating the premature sexualization of children by adults requires focused attention from both lawmakers and courageous parents.

We are asking you to take the steps needed to ensure that this agenda is not sponsored by our tax money.

Allowing children to have easy access to books in which two men get married was tantamount to child abuse, said the woman who later kidnapped and injured her own special needs daughter in order to teach her a lesson.

Jeffrey Hamby also delivered a public statement to the Quorum Court in which he asked, “Ask yourself, as leaders of our community, is teaching our child that they may be queer or homosexual or a drag queen the best use of our limited tax resources?”

It helped that the Hambys had support from Christian Nationalists in their area. According to one news report:

The Hambys were supported by the River Valley City Elders, a community organization that touts itself as “ambassadors for Christ who stand in the gap for our cities spiritually through prayer, unity, and activism.”

That particular group’s website is sparse, but it makes clear their goal is to create a local theocracy by getting Christians in public office, passing laws that “reflect a Biblical Worldview and Judeo-Christian values and ethics,” and making sure God is glorified in “the Church, Civic Government, and Business.”

In any case, that letter and the Hambys’ advocacy had an effect. The Quorum Court officials pressured the library’s administrators to remove LGBTQ children’s books from the shelves, put a “prominent color label” on them, and create a new “social section” for those books. (Very separate-but-equal vibes.)

It wasn’t just books about LGBTQ people, either. Months later, Hamby said in an email that she wanted the library system’s director, Deidre Grzymala, to relocate books that taught girls how to use tampons:

All of this put library administrators in an awkward position. They knew books shouldn’t be banned or segregated—and that it was illegal to do so—but they also didn’t want to lose their funding or their jobs. So they agreed to that “compromise” of a different section for children’s books that might offend conservative Christians. (One lawsuit pointed out that the Social Section also included “a book on world religions; a book about people with disabilities; and a book that normalizes blended families, i.e., families in which both parents are divorced and have children from prior relationships.”)

Several members of the library’s board resigned after that. And while a library’s director traditionally appoints replacements in that situation, one of Hamby’s friends, Chris Keith, had become the incoming County Judge and he decided to appoint the replacements himself.

So he appointed Hamby to the library’s board. She was now Chairwoman of the Crawford County Library System.

Grzymala soon resigned. (She argued in a later defamation lawsuit that she was “forced out of her Director job” despite doing everything the Christian zealots wanted.)

As you might guess, none of this went over well with the literate part of the community. That’s why some local parents sued over the separate-but-equal book reorganization—and they were successful. A federal judge soon ordered the library officials to “immediately dissolve” the separate section and put the books back where they belonged.

“It is unquestionably true that the First Amendment permits public libraries to
restrict minors’ access to materials that are not age-appropriate, but while those restrictions will inevitably be content-based they must still be ‘viewpoint-neutral,’” he wrote.

…

Holmes wrote that “it is one thing to restrict minors’ access to sexually explicit material, but a very different thing to restrict minors’ access to unpopular opinions. Here, the undisputed evidence shows that the social section was created not only for the former purpose but also for the latter, which violates the First Amendment.”

So the library system lost that federal lawsuit (as they should have). Hamby later argued that the library system she now helped manage—and not the county officials who pushed Grzymala to do all the illegal things—should pay the legal costs. Basically, a representative of the library board was arguing that the library system should be further punished for doing the illegal thing she demanded they do. Just awful stewardship. It’s as irresponsible as a district superintendent arguing that her school district doesn’t need more funding.

As of August of 2024, the county had spent about $426,000 fighting all these legal battles stemming from their inability to handle LGBTQ books. A more recent article puts the amount at over $575,000. That’s the tangible damage that one batshit crazy Christian zealot has caused this community.

By the way, Tammi Hamby submitted her resignation from the library board on November 24—a week after the kidnapping—claiming that she was moving away. So she’s a liar in addition to being a Christian Nationalist.

So what began as a story about the grotesque cruelty of two parents who terrorized their own vulnerable daughter turns out to be a much larger story about how conservative Christian extremists just destroy everything they touch.

The Hambys built their public identities around the notion that they were moral guardians. They pretended to be warriors against the imagined threats of LGBTQ people lurking in picture books. Yet when confronted with an actual parenting challenge, they resorted to violence, deception, and psychological torture. They talked about safeguarding innocence, but in reality, they did the opposite. This isn’t a fluke. This is what we see all the time. The loudest bigoted voices are all too often hiding their own deep dark hypocritical secrets.

The Hambys waged war on librarians for shelving books about LGBTQ families, calling it “child abuse,” even as they orchestrated a literal kidnapping of their own daughter. They demanded censorship in the name of protecting minors, then organized the physical restraining of someone under their own care. There’s Christian hypocrisy, and then there’s whatever the hell the Hambys have been doing. The gap between their morality and their actions is practically the Grand Canyon.

That’s why people like Tammi Hamby should never be treated as moral authorities. They don’t give a shit about children. All they care about is power. The most dangerous thing in Crawford County aren’t those children’s books; it’s the Hambys. And because of what they did, the entire community has suffered.

So let this be a warning against ever trusting aggressive Christian culture warriors who claim to speak for everyone but actually represent a small sliver of local bigots. There’s no amount of Bible-quoting or anti-LGBTQ fear-mongering that can cover up their own cruelty and hypocrisy.

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