GOP Prosecutor Denies Wanting to Go After Librarians Over LGBTQ+ Books
The Republican candidate for district attorney in a Tenessee county, who called for the prosecution of librarians for making books on LGBTQ+ issues available to children, won her election last week.
Now she's denying that she ever considered prosecutions, but a video reveals otherwise.Coty Wamp won the election to be Hamilton County, Tenn.'s district attorney on August 4.
As elected officials across the country called for banning or restricting books dealing with LGBTQ+ themes and issues of racism, Wamp joined the chorus in May, advocating for the prosecution of librarians who stock books she finds objectionable.A video from a campaign event recently resurfaced on YouTube and tells the story.An audience member asks Wamp a lengthy question about whether it is appropriate to prosecute librarians for the "awful" things they allow to be placed in front of children.
The questioner said that the right-wing group Moms for Liberty has exposed "obscenity and vulgar language" in library books.Wamp says in the video that she connected a representative of Moms for Liberty with the local sheriff for whom she was an attorney at the time."I think that there is going to come a time in some of these books where it crosses a criminal line," Wamp says. "It's called contributing to the delinquency of a minor."She equates handing out inappropriate brochures to children as they walk into school with providing them access to library resources.
