American libraries are in a dangerous moment. Elected demagogues and right-wing mobs are attacking the sacred principle of unfettered access to books. They spin bogus allegations about porn inundating the shelves as leverage to force their own retrograde politics on the wider culture.

Stopping this insidious movement should be an urgent priority for anyone who understands its inherent threat to a free society.

Which is why this is about the worst moment for a public library to stock a book titled, "Bang Like a Porn Star: Sex Tips From the Pros."

Sorry if we've ruined anyone's breakfast. But the book — which is reportedly exactly what it sounds like — was discovered in the St. Charles City-County Library system's collection, and has now undermined the library board's valiant resistance to an ongoing siege by local right-wing activists.

This editorial page has consistently sided with libraries against the current conservative campaign of cultural hysteria against them, and we still do. Which is why it's important to call them out on self-sabotaging mistakes like this, which hand matches and gasoline to the would-be book-burners.

The current brouhaha surrounding the St. Charles library system is being pushed by some of the same culture-war activists who earlier promoted a deeply silly controversy over a cross-dressing library clerk.

They were back at it during Tuesday's St. Charles County-City Library Board meeting, demanding the removal of two books they discovered in the library system's collection.

One, "It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender and Sexual Health," is a decades-old children's book explaining puberty and sex. It has been lauded by pediatricians and educators for its science-based approach to these delicate topics.

Libraries should offer serious, expert-reviewed materials like this, even on uncomfortable topics — just as parents should make their own decisions about whether their individual kids are ready for such reading.

In that sense, the activists' targeting of it illustrates how extreme their campaign is, and why it's important for the public to stand with libraries against this kind of zealotry.

But the other book the activists have targeted, the aforementioned porn-tips-from-pros book (complete with illustrations), utterly compromises that stand.

Uncomfortable, controversial, envelope-pushing material is and should be available at public libraries, if properly segregated into adult sections (which this book reportedly was).

But with tax-funded collections, there are lines. And you don't have to be a right-wing culture warrior to conclude that out-and-out promotion of pornography crosses them.

As the Post-Dispatch's Ethan Colbert reports, just one copy of the book was stocked at one library in a system that has almost a million books in it and acquires tens of thousands more every year. It could certainly have been a mere oversight that it ended up there at all.

And the board's answer to the activists demanding its immediate removal — that there's a formal process for requesting that, and they must use it — was the right one. No library should immediately pull anything off any shelf based on nothing but a mob of ideologues loudly demanding it at a meeting.

But in these dangerous times, public libraries must make sure their collections don't cross that line from provocative to indefensible. The issue isn't ultimately about corrupting young minds — the internet more than has that covered — but about preventing politicians and activists from leveraging even isolated lapses in judgment by libraries.

Consider Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft's outrageous policy of forcing public libraries to submit to state oversight of their collections or risk their state funding. A cynical play to the hard right in his upcoming gubernatorial campaign, Ashcroft justified it with the toxic, fabricated implication that librarians are routinely foisting pornography on an unsuspecting public.

That's no more true now than it was before — but now demagogues like Ashcroft have an actual example to point to.

The fact that it's an isolated aberration won't prevent them from using it to vilify the entire culture of libraries. That's how demagoguery works. That's the book that libraries risk cracking open if they aren't scrupulously responsible about their decisions on what to shelve.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

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