A Missouri man who tried to ban several lgbtq books from schools for depicting sexual content is now facing a felony charge of second-degree child abuse.
ryan utterback, a 29-year-old father from a suburb of kansas city, also faces a misdemeanor charge of domestic battery in the fourth degree and, in a separate case, a misdemeanor charge of providing or attempting to provide pornographic material to a minor.
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utterback had spoken at a school board meeting in november, as first reported by local news station kmbc-tv, an abc affiliate, to advocate for the removal of books from city school libraries. northern kansas city showing sexual acts.
During another school board meeting in October, Utterback held up enlarged prints of two pages from the award-winning graphic memoir “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” while a member of a parent association fighting for the ban spoke, arguing that handing the material to a child amounts to “solicitation of a minor.”
The allegations against utterback, according to court documents, describe separate instances in 2020 in which he allegedly groped a 12-year-old girl under her clothes and rubbed a teenage girl’s leg under her jeans. another case alleged in 2021 that he showed pornographic video images to a girl since she was around 4 years old.
utterback is due in court on March 10. His attorney, David Bell, declined to comment on the search.
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Northern Kansas City Schools declined to comment.
Lgbtq-inclusive books have long topped banned book lists: titles with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer themes comprised half of the top 20 most contested and banned books of the decade covered from 2010 to 2019, according to the American Library. association. While challenges against lgbtq content have historically been “constant,” according to deborah caldwell-stone, director of the wing’s office of intellectual freedom, she told nbc news in november that the association had seen a “chilling” increase in the year. previous.
“I’ve worked on the wing for two decades and I’ve never seen this volume of challenges come up,” Caldwell-stone said at the time.
Mary O’Hara, rapid response manager at the LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD, said in an email that challenged books in schools typically undergo an evaluation process by experts in literacy and education, who read them in their entirety to determine their academic and social merit. Many of these books then return to library shelves.
“Book ban advocates have long tried to incorrectly claim that lgbtq representation in books, movies, television, and advertisements is ‘inappropriate’ or ‘obscene,’ while other media with narratives and themes about Opposite-sex relationships, even those with graphic sex or violence, are not objective,” O’Hara said.
Those in favor of bans, including utterback, have raised the issue of parental rights in choosing what to expose children to. Most of the books coming out more recently feature stories that include lgbtq and race, o’hara said.
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“lgbtq people and black people are parents too and have a voice in their children’s education,” they said, adding that schools should “ensure that books are available for all children to learn about themselves and about people different from them”.
justice horn, an advocate for the kansas city lgbtq community who was the first black student president at the university of missouri-kansas city, was present at the november school board meeting where utterback spoke.
“The moral of this story is that book bans don’t protect children,” Horn said of the accusations against Utterback. “Furthermore, the people pushing for book bans are not protecting children, and all lawmakers should take note.”
The “heroes” of the story, Horn said, are the students in the northern Kansas city who spoke before the school board to fight these bans.
“They are making sure that none of our stories are deleted,” he continued. “We’ll be reading about them long after the people seeking to ban the books have disappeared.”
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