Idaho library board cancels Juneteenth

[jmowreader]

https://cdapress.com/news/2024/mar/23/CLN-drops-Juneteenth-as-recognized-holiday/

(Standard disclosure: this is from the newspaper I work for, and I have known the reporter who wrote this for...oh, probably ten years. She's awesome.)

HAYDEN — The Community Library Network will no longer observe Juneteenth, the state and federally recognized holiday that marks the end of slavery in the United States.

Chair Rachelle Ottosen, Vice Chair Tom Hanley and Trustee Tim Plass voted in favor of dropping Juneteenth as the board updated the holiday section of the network's personnel policy Thursday during a regular meeting at the Hayden Library. Juneteenth, or June 19, was added to the network's calendar last year following President Joe Biden's 2021 signing of a bill passed by Congress to reserve the day as a federal holiday.

The motion, which traded the Juneteenth holiday for a day off the day after Thanksgiving, was opposed by Trustees Vanessa Robinson and Katie Blank and criticized by members of the public as being racially motivated.

Just so you know, Tom Hanley and Tim Plass were foisted upon us all by Brent Regan's Kootenai County Republican Central Committee. They ran for office on the platform that the libraries up here are just FULL of porn and they're gonna get all of it out of there. So far they've been entirely successful in eradicating the porn from the library, but since there wasn't any in the first place they didn't have far to travel to reach that goal.