Huntington Beach will decide next week on whether to repeal a community review board for library material. It’s a test of the conservative city council’s growing clout and the national movement to restrict access to sexual content in children’s books
by Alexei Koseff
The simmering battle over the public library in Huntington Beach erupted again this spring when provocative signs cropped up around town overnight.
“Protect our kids from porn,” the placards warned in bold red letters. Funded by a city councilmember’s political action committee, they urged people to vote against a pair of ballot measures in an upcoming special election, including one that would abolish a controversial new community review board for library books.
As parents dropping off their children spotted the blunt message near elementary schools that April morning, outrage began to spread online over the delicate explanations it required for kids who were far too young to understand. One man declared on social media that he cut the word “porn” out of 12 signs and delivered the pieces to city hall.
“Frankly, it reads more like a tactic to provoke than a message grounded in conservative values, and that’s something I believe we should rise above,” the man said in a video posted to a popular Facebook forum.
Now, with only a week remaining before election day, proponents of the ballot measures to roll back library restrictions are hoping enough of those frustrated, weary parents in this Orange County beach community show up to carry them to victory.
The election — the culmination of nearly two years of tense clashes over sexual content in children’s books, parental rights and censorship — carries the weight of more than just the future of the local library.
An ascendant political movement, led by the self-proclaimed “MAGA-nificent 7” members of the city council, has in recent years turned Huntington Beach into the bulwark of conservative resistance to California’s progressive governance and a hotbed of nationally resonant culture wars, including on vaccines, Pride flags and voter ID.
As complaints about obscene material being available to young readers dragged even the once-beloved library into the fray, the increasingly marginalized liberal residents of Huntington Beach have mobilized — and floundered. Not unlike the national Democratic Party, which has grappled with how to counteract the full-throttle early months of President Donald Trump’s second term, their struggle to curb the breakneck transformation of their city’s identity have left many wondering how far the council can push its revolution.
“It’s just a war being waged on the community by people in an attempt to gain power,” said Natalie Moser, a former member of a liberal council minority who was ousted in November. She has criticized the Huntington Beach conservatives for reframing all of city politics as a partisan fight. “People are easier to manipulate when they’re divided, when they don’t see each other as people but just another side.”
The most optimistic believe the “protect our kids from porn” signs could be a turning point, waking up apolitical voters and swaying moderates in this Republican-leaning community to reject the restrictions on library material. If the ballot measures pass next week, they hope it will send a signal that residents want the city council to refocus on the fundamentals of municipal governance — public safety, road maintenance and economic development.
“It’s just so disheartening to see our city council turn this city against itself,” said Erin Spivey, one of several Huntington Beach librarians who quit in the past two years because of city interventions that they considered repressive. “People are getting really sick and tired of the city council overstepping what they are supposed to be doing. They’re supposed to be making our community better.”
‘Let the community decide’ on kids books
Amid a surging national book banning movement, the debate arrived in Huntington Beach two summers ago, when then-new Councilmember Gracey Van Der Mark — a locally notorious activist who made it her cause célèbre to get what she deems sexual content out of the children’s section — first proposed reviewing and restricting access to certain library material.
Van Der Mark is alarmed by a contemporary wave of picture books and sex education manuals that she feels goes far beyond what is appropriate for young readers and could damage kids who accidentally encounter the material before they are ready.
Titles she has frequently cited include “Grandad’s Pride,” which features a drawing of a Pride parade where two men in leather are kissing in the crowd, and “It’s Perfectly Normal,” which the Huntington Beach library moved to a restricted section last year because it includes illustrations of naked people alongside its explanations of puberty.
“The last thing you want is a child to pick up a book and have a big picture of penises or instructions for how to masturbate,” she said in an interview.
The city council eventually adopted an ordinance establishing a 21-member community board to review library books for “textual or graphic references to sex, sexual organs, sex acts, relationships of sexual nature, or sexual relations in any form.” The board would have the authority to move the material to the adult section or prevent the library from purchasing it in the first place, though it has yet to be seated, in part because of a subsequent state law prohibiting these types of committees.
Van Der Mark compares the concept to the movie ratings system, arguing that it would empower parents by giving them more say in what their children read. She complained that librarians who reject the community input because they believe they know better are elitist.
“Librarians are human. They are human. They are not perfect, just like you and I are not perfect. Mistakes are going to be made,” she said. “Let the community decide. Let the community give their input on whether they think those books meet their community standards.”
But the opposition to library book restrictions has been fierce and sustained, frequently spilling into long, rancorous public comment sessions at city council meetings. Free speech advocacy groups have joined, including the ACLU, which filed a lawsuit earlier this year.
Critics say they fear the book review committee would allow the city council to assert more control over the library and eventually ban material that doesn’t align with its conservative views.
They are especially concerned that many of the books Van Der Mark and her allies have singled out are LGBTQ-themed. Some see warning signs in the recent cancellation of a library book club for gay novel “The Guncle” and a Facebook post by another city councilmember tying the “dramatic alarming rise” in LGBTQ identification among young people to the “explosion of LGBTQ+ literature.”
“What they’re trying to do is exert their moral standards on others — and that’s unacceptable in society,” said Gina Clayton-Tarvin, a member of a local school district board that endorsed the ballot measures. “This is almost like attacking what is American.”
Lindsay Klick, a Huntington Beach parent and a longtime librarian in Orange County, said library collections should be expansive, so that everyone can find books that interest them and decide for themselves what they want to read.
“The library is not a winner-take-all thing like an election,” she said.
She criticized the city council for manufacturing outrage over sexual content in the library by selectively highlighting small excerpts from books out of their context, as if cropping the crotch from a picture of the statue of David.
It’s an effective strategy for politicians looking to raise their profiles as they seek higher office; Van Der Mark, who launched a bid for state Assembly last month, is the latest.
But it’s not a true reflection of how library patrons feel, Klick said, like at the small Orange County branch where she works near the Air Force base in Los Alamitos, which has the same books that the Huntington Beach city council has objected to.
“No one complains. It’s not a problem,” she said. “Why? Because we don’t have Gracey Van Der Mark.”
Ground zero in the national book battle
A special election in Huntington Beach carries high stakes for the national battle over children’s library books.
Library supporters collected thousands of signatures last fall for the pair of ballot measures; the second would limit the city’s ability to outsource library services, after the city council briefly explored privatizing the library last year. The council called a special election for June 10, rather than adopting the proposals outright or placing them on the ballot in 2026.
The outcome has become deeply important for the conservatives backing the city council as well. The two sides collectively spent more than $230,000 on the campaign by late May.
National activist Karen England, whose organization pushes to remove “pornographic books” from schools, has been speaking at city council meetings and church services in recent weeks to help raise awareness for the ‘no’ campaign. She said this is the first ballot measure that she is aware of challenging a book removal policy at a public library and she worries that, if successful, it could become a model for librarians across the country to cut parents out of deciding what their children read.
“That’s what I’m fighting against. They don’t know best,” she said. “I do feel like this is ground zero.”
The campaign has gotten extremely heated, with each side accusing the other of using emotion and misinformation to whip residents into a confused frenzy about what they’re actually voting on. Proponents of the ballot measures mock the conservative city council for injecting more government into peoples’ lives. Opponents complain that they are hamstrung in making their case to voters, because the offending library material is so obscene that they cannot even show it on social media or the news.
But the tension reached a zenith with the “protect our kids from porn” signs, which furious library supporters say unfairly portrayed it as a place run by groomers and pedophiles.
“If they feel like there is porn in the library, they should come and arrest me. Because I personally handed ‘It’s Perfectly Normal’ to patrons,” the former librarian Spivey said. “I wish they would, because it would show the community that what they’re doing is a lie.”
Van Der Mark, the architect of the library book review committee, said critics are simply trying to distract from the pornographic nature of the challenged books.
“You’re offended by the word (porn) but not the actual material,” she said.
Yet despite the heightened significance that both sides place on the special election, neither seems ready to stand down if they lose. The ACLU lawsuit is still in court, and many Huntington Beach conservatives say they could never accept the challenged books being available in the children’s section of the library.
Casey McKeon, another city councilmember heavily involved in the library debate, said he is frustrated by how vehemently some people have pushed back against the book review board, even though the council “did this the right way” — through its policymaking process, because local parents were upset about the material.
“So we’re not supposed to fix an issue if it’s quote-unquote social or cultural?” he said.
The conservative city council members are leading Huntington Beach exactly the way that voters elected them to, McKeon said, and while the pace of the changes may upset some people, the council cannot wait to fix what it sees is wrong with the city.
“You only get four years,” he said. “You don’t know if you’re going to get re-elected. You don’t have forever.”
