By Kyle Davidson, Michigan Advance
Both the American Civil Liberties Union and the director of the Cromaine District Library in Hartland are raising concerns after the library’s board of trustees decided to reshelve 148 challenged books — many of which feature LGBTQ+ content — without review.
While the board agreed in October that they would review more than 200 books challenged by community members, after receiving a letter appealing Director Sarah Neidert’s determinations, the process has proved lengthy.
As of the board’s May meeting, Board President Jeannine Gogoleski said the board had read 58 of the 218 challenged books. While the board’s treasurer, Nancy Rosso, made a motion to uphold Neidert’s decision, the board rejected the proposal, voting 4-1 on another motion to move the remaining books to the adult section, with Rosso in opposition.
In response, Jay Kaplan, a longtime attorney with the Michigan ACLU’s LGBTQ+ Project who has been monitoring book challenges and policy changes at the library, sent a letter to the board.
“Given this disregard for the review process that the Board promulgated, coupled with previous statements by some Trustees that they are opposed to LGBTQ related materials, we believe that the recent action by the Board raises serious due process and First Amendment issues,” Kaplan wrote in the letter.
Among the board’s members is Bill Bolin, the pastor of FloodGate Church in Brighton, who has been accused of combining preaching with a “diatribe” on conspiracies and right-wing politics and was prominently featured in Atlantic Staff Writer Tim Alberta’s 2023 book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.”
In February 2025, while serving as president of the board, Bolin told attendees of the board’s monthly meeting that he desired to “protect children from the harm that can befall them over coercive behavior,” noting that he, along with other colleagues, was suggesting “a commonsense approach to changing the sexual tone and nature of some library policies and practices.”
“Tonight, we will discuss several controversial items on our agenda, including the removal of June Pride displays, labeling certain books that may be controversial, moving said books into an age-restricted area, providing supervision in the teen area to monitor behavior, and returning the Pledge of Allegiance to our monthly meetings,” Bolin said, according to the approved minutes for the meeting.
While the board would later consider placing challenged materials in a separate section or behind glass, members instead adopted a policy to label books found to contain extreme violence or graphic sexual content.
In his letter, Kaplan also pointed to the board’s decision to seek separate legal advice from Alliance Defending Freedom on the sequestration, after its counsel warned that adopting any steps to restrict access to challenged materials would place the library on “shaky constitutional ground.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified Alliance Defending Freedom as a hate group, noting that the group has supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad.
As a quasi-municipal corporation, library boards are required by law to adopt and follow their own governance rules, Kaplan wrote.
While the board’s process for considering an appeal requires members “have access to and completely read or review the challenged material”, Kaplan argues the board abandoned the process, overriding the director’s decision.
“In essence, the Board has capitulated to the challengers of these 160 titles, relying on their subjective allegations, that such books (a majority of which feature LGBTQ characters and situations), are inappropriately housed in the children’s section of the library,” Kaplan wrote. “This raises significant concerns about due process, as well as unconstitutional censorship by this Board.”
When you establish a procedure, even in an ad hoc manner, you need to follow that procedure, Kaplan told Michigan Advance in an interview on Monday, arguing that a failure to do so raises due process concerns.
While discussing Kaplan’s letter at the board’s most recent meeting, Neidert said her staff had raised similar concerns.
“Here’s the question my staff have asked me, and one of them really writes well. She said, ‘If the board can disregard the review process in this case, under what circumstances would it be required to follow it?’” Neidert said. “And that’s my question.”
While the library does not restrict minors from checking out materials from the adult section, Kaplan says it sends a message when books that are geared for younger readers are placed in the adult section because they contain LGBTQ characters or themes.
Moving books to another section of the library can create a stigma or an inconvenience for those looking to access the materials, Kaplan said. If the intention was to move LGBTQ content so that they cannot be seen in certain sections of the library, that also raises First Amendment concerns, Kaplan said.
In his letter, Kaplan argued that the act of moving the books at all is a restriction in and of itself, pointing to Sund v. City of Wichita Falls, Texas, a federal court case which held that a resolution to move a number of children’s books to the adult section of a Texas library violated patrons’ First Amendment right to receive information.Cromaine-District-Library-Legal-Issues-Concerning-Access-to-Books201196004.2-4-1 (3)
“The resolution placed a ‘significant burden’ on this right, because neither people searching for the relocated titles nor people browsing the children’s section of the library would be able to find the titles that had been moved,” Kaplan wrote.
Questions around review process remain
During the board’s June 18 meeting, Neidert voiced her own concerns about the decision to relocate the challenged materials, telling the trustees that she’d almost decided not to move them.
“My training and instincts tell me I shouldn’t have moved them, but wanting to keep my job had me move them,” Neidert said. “And nobody threatened me, but I understand that if you don’t do a board directive, that’s a bad thing.”
Trustee Dawn Smith was critical of Kaplan’s letter noting that it mentioned older case law, but did not mention Little V. Llano County, where patrons of a county library in Texas sued the librarian and other officials after they removed 17 books following complaints about their racial, sexual and LGBTQ+ themes.
While a federal district court agreed that the books’ removal violated the First Amendment, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed that decision, determining that patrons cannot invoke their right to receive information in order to challenge a library’s decisions on which books to buy, keep or remove. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a further appeal.
Neidert pressed the board to seek an updated legal opinion from its attorney, noting that there has been a lot of legal movement pertaining to libraries and their collections.
“The landscape is shifting about what is required, and the cases are in different parts of the country, so I need to know what happens in Michigan,” Neidert told the Advance.
Rosso criticized the decision to reshelve the books to begin with, arguing the board’s behavior was risky and could carry serious financial consequences if the board is sued.
Additionally, if the board receives another appeal to a book challenge, Rosso argued they do not have a policy in place to respond, as the majority voted to go against its established policy.
“If we’re going to change the policy, that would be different,” Rosso said. “I think the committee needs to come in with a new draft.”
Practical questions of how to deal with large amounts of materials up for appeal continued to spark conversations among the trustees.
Before the board voted to reshelve the remaining books on appeal in May, Smith suggested that book challenges should not allow an individual to challenge 200 books, and that there should be a limit.
Smith raised similar concerns last week, saying the board needs to look at its challenge policy.
“If this does happen again, I don’t want to do this again,” Smith said, noting her preference would be for the trustees to read the books while acknowledging that members were having a hard time reviewing the materials in a timely manner.
The board had a logical alternative to that, Rosso said, noting that they could have accepted Neidert’s determination and trusted in her credentials and the members of the library staff, who had read the books.
Becky Basley, the board’s vice president, suggested the issue lay within the execution, noting the board does not have a policy around what to do with books while a challenge is reviewed.
Smith proposed that the books could be moved and then reviewed.
“You can’t have a process where nothing is done, where you’re looking through it and it’s just not happening,” Smith said. “And to me the risk of kids reading a book with inappropriate content is a real risk versus people having to go to another section and find it on a cart.”
When asked about this proposal, Kaplan questioned whether the board would follow through with that review.
“If you say it’s too cumbersome to review this, that you can’t conduct a review, then maybe you shouldn’t be conducting a review,” Kaplan said. “Maybe you should approve what the library director did. But don’t say we want to have the last say, and yet we’re too busy, so we’re just going to go ahead and give people what they want.”
Kaplan did agree with the idea of placing limits on the challenge process, noting that one such proposal had sat before the Michigan Legislature in years prior.
The whole idea behind a book challenge is that an individual should have legitimate and sincere concerns over the contents of a book, Kaplan said.
Alongside reading the book, challengers should be able to articulate why a book is inappropriate for a library, or its section or why it may require a label, Kaplan said, as opposed to challenging a bulk number of titles.
“It’d be a great idea to tweak that process and not have these huge number of challenges like this,” Kaplan said. “You pick one book that you challenge and see how that process goes before you do another one.”
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