To the not even 15,000 souls who actually live in the [Pennsylvania's] fourth least-populous county, the Fulton County Library on North First Street, in the county seat of McConnellsburg, is a kind of a metaphorical turnpike to a wider world, offering computer terminals for locals lacking internet access and meeting rooms for an array of community groups, while trying to acquire the latest books on its shoestring budget.
Last week, library leaders — who’d seen a small county subsidy (just under 4% of its budget) slashed in half during the Great Recession — sent the Fulton County commissioners a request for an additional $3,000 in the new year, which would bring its total stipend back up to $15,000, or what it had been in the 2000s.
But the two Republicans who wield majority power on the three-member panel said absolutely not, and — according to the account of the meeting in the local weekly, the Fulton County News — they were blunt in explaining why: The library had over the summer given an OK for a proposed new support group for Fulton County’s small, largely invisible LGBTQ-plus community to hold biweekly meetings in its public space.
[...]
“If we support them, we have to support Proud Boys and Black Lives Matter,” said [GOP commissioner Randy] Bunch, one of the 85.3% of Fulton County residents who voted for Trump in 2020, the highest percentage in Pennsylvania. The other Republican commissioner, Stuart Ulsh, agreed with Bunch and offered a seeming non-sequitur in defense of his position.
“Do we want Muslims moving into our county?” Ulsh asked, before citing an internet conspiracy theory — thoroughly debunked by Snopes.com — that a Muslim man had been arrested on U.S. soil with a 30-year blueprint for taking over America.
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The blowback started with a local activist Emily Best.
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Over the weekend, Best’s plea for support on Twitter circulated among a community of progressive activists, and it gained steam when a social-media heavyweight — Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a 2022 Democratic candidate for the open U.S. Senate seat — adopted the cause. She also learned of a similar campaign that had been launched on Facebook as a response to the commissioners’ comments about the LGBTQ community. By Tuesday morning, Best’s GoFundMe page had raised $14,495 from 382 donors, while the Facebook drive has raised more than $9,000, or more than eight times the additional dollars sought from the county commission. That total is sure to rise as the controversy gets more publicity.
There’s no immediate plan for how that new money will get spent, but Brambley told me the library would love to add to its current collection of 25 almost-always-out internet “hot spots,” expand its on-site community resources such as 3-D printers and sewing machines, and add to its growing collection of expensive but increasingly popular e-books.
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But the real value of the Fulton County library fund drive is both intangible and worth far more than $24,000 — the notion that political hate and ignorant intolerance can be beaten back, even in Pennsylvania’s Trumpiest county.
Philadelphia Inquirer
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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