An Arkansas lawmaker's wife is swapping pro-LGBTQ books with bibles in Little Free Libraries

"A lot of these books... don’t align with our Christian values," wrote Jennifer Meeks

This newsletter is free, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can use the button below to subscribe to Substack or use my usual Patreon page!

---

The wife of an Arkansas legislator is going door to door, to houses with a Little Free Library in the yard, and replacing items she doesn’t like with bibles and gospel tracts. It’s a legal form of religious proselytizing and bigotry—and it appears to be backfiring.

If you’re not familiar with Little Free Libraries (LFLs), they’re absolutely wonderful ways to exchange books with complete strangers. In essence, you set up a little bookstand in front of your home and anyone who walks by is welcome to browse the contents and take a book. The hope is they’ll eventually return it, but most people aren’t keeping tabs. It’s about promoting literacy, after all.

A Little Free Library (screenshot via YouTube)

A few years ago, I learned that some people were using these libraries as vessels to promote their religion. They would leave pamphlets and tracts and mini-bibles inside various LFLs hoping that someone would eventually stumble upon them.

It’s a lot easier than knocking on doors.

That strategy is now being used by Jennifer Meeks, the wife of Arkansas State Rep. Stephen Meeks. Meeks recently posted on Facebook about how she had been “swapping out books” in LFLs that didn’t live up to her conservative Christian standards. She would use an app to find local LFLs, check to see if they contained pro-LGBTQ material, and then replace them with Christian items of her own. She called this a tactic the “silent majority can do.”

I have been swapping out books in little free libraries for awhile. I have seen good books, terrible books, toiletries, and needles (yes, needles).

Recently I have been picking up free Bibles at flea markets and thrift stores. Sometimes I find good devotion books or kids’ Bible stories at a good price to add. Or just great books, and a gospel tract is a nice idea too.

There’s an app (Little Free Library) to find these boxes. Not all of them are registered because there’s a $40 fee to do that. There’s a couple in Greenbrier, several in Conway, and a bunch in Little Rock. They’re all over there [sic] United States. This is an opportunity to be salt and light in our communities.

From what I have seen, a lot of these books and other things don’t align with our Christian values. Today I saw a bunch of Pride stuff in one. There’s a group of leftists, especially in Conway, who are very active in keeping little libraries well stocked. They’re very active in other areas too. But I shouldn’t go there.

This is something the silent majority can do. That doesn’t mean we have to stay silent, but this is pretty easy.

That Facebook post has since been deleted or made private, but not before someone connected with the Faulkner County Coalition for Social Justice grabbed a screenshot. Meeks argued, “There’s a group of leftists… who are very active in keeping little libraries stocked,” as justification for why her people needed to replace the bad content with good Christian content.

She later said in comments that she had done just that herself:

It’s not that this is illegal. It is, however, unethical. It violates the unspoken contract of LFLs, which is that people are exchanging books in good faith, not using someone else’s library to carry out some personal religious agenda.

It’s worth noting that one of the LFLs she included in her post belongs to St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Conway, a progressive church whose LFL has its own Facebook page. Late last week, the church posted a note reminding everyone that one of the goals of the non-profit group that oversees LFLs was “championing diverse books.” They operated under those terms and expected “those who use this library to abide by them” too.

If Meeks thought this gambit would work, though, she may be mistaken. The Arkansas Times noted:

The Faulkner County Coalition for Social Justice said donations keep rolling in, plenty to keep their Little Free Libraries well stocked.

“Keep removing them, Jennifer. We won’t stop. We’ve received $1,000+ to supply our community with food, toiletries, reproductive care items, and naloxone. These materials are saving lives. The lives of queer kids who aren’t out to their parents, to the teen that needs Plan B to avoid having a forced pregnancy, to the good neighbor preventing an overdose,” the coalition wrote on social media.

You can donate to the group here.

Rep. Stephen Meeks, by the way, isn’t an innocent bystander here. Earlier this year, he supported a bill that “could lead to criminal liability for Arkansas librarians” if someone checked out a book deemed “obscene” by the community. Meeks himself challenged two sex education books for teenagers in the Faulkner County Library because he didn’t think kids should have access to them. (The library rejected his challenge.)

It’s no wonder his wife also wants to control what people can read. The couple can’t handle the idea that other people like books that they find impure—including books that showcase LGBTQ people in a positive light.

Yesterday, Stephen Meeks argued that articles about his wife’s actions were “blown completely out of proportion.” She’s not removing books she disagrees with, he explained. She’s just increasing the value of the libraries by giving people a wider array of options.

Rather, Meeks said, his wife is adding Christian-related books as well as history, science and other books. Sometimes, she will remove a worn-out history book, for example, and replace it with one in better condition, he said.

“The point that she was trying to make is that she saw the Pride material in there. As Christians, it would be a good opportunity that we too should be stocking those resources with Bibles, devotionals, things like that,” Meeks said. “In other words, we want to give people more choice, and I think everybody would agree that having more choice is a good thing.”

Meeks said his wife did not want to discuss the matter.

Christians like them just love choice. Unless it’s women making choices about their own bodies, or trans people seeking health care, or random people putting out books in front of their own homes, in which case the Meeks think they know better than everyone else.

(Would anyone like to guess what the right-wing reaction would be if liberal activists added pro-LGBTQ books to conservatives’ collections in the name of “choice”?)

This is what we’ve come to expect from Republicans who don’t want others having access to literature that might challenge their batshit insane theology. They demonize public libraries, they want to ban books from public schools, and now they’re going after mini-libraries on private property.

---