How a Moms for Liberty-aligned attack on library content is upending politics in Philly burbs

When Natalie Cimonetti received a threatening letter from the police chief of Telford, a quiet borough of about 5,000 people that straddles the Montgomery-Bucks county line, she was stunned.

A mother of two, she works as a community organizer for Red Wine & Blue, which aims to mobilize a voting bloc of liberal, suburban, “wine moms” — a mission that has put her at odds with Moms for Liberty, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls an extremist parental-rights group.

The Aug. 9 letter signed by Chief Randall Floyd said the Montgomery County District Attorney had determined that, based on Cimonetti’s social media posts, “criminal charges are warranted” — and would be filed if Cimonetti didn’t lay off her “campaign of internet stalking and doxing” Moms for Liberty members.

Cimonetti denies stalking anyone. And the ACLU of Pennsylvania called the warning she received “illegal intimidation” and an alarming example of law-enforcement overreach intended to chill free speech.

For Cimonetti, it’s proof that her small town — one square mile of suburban-style homes and grassy lawns whose significant landmarks include a supermarket and the Indian Valley Public Library — has been fully consumed by the incendiary politics that have led to bitter fights over masking mandates, curricula and school-library books in the region’s school districts.

The conflict comes amid a Telford Borough Council race that Cimonetti has been deeply involved in — and that has effectively been reframed as a moral crisis. The library, and whether to continue funding it, has become a flashpoint in that campaign, driven by a slate of Republican candidates, two of them write-ins, who swept their primaries by claiming that obscene material sitting on its shelves is being made available to children.

Earlier this year, the Telford council approved a 25% cut in its funding to the library, which serves five towns that make up the Souderton Area School District — in part, to satisfy Floyd’s request for increased police funding. It also made its allocation to the library a line item that can be struck out in any given month.

The police chief denied having any relationship with Moms for Liberty, and said he routinely sends out warnings in situations in which harassment occurs. “I don’t care what side of the issue they’re on,” he said. In his view, Cimonetti’s posts, including a spreadsheet of local Moms’ identities, with links to their Facebook profiles and the addresses of their workplaces, fit that definition. The Montgomery County DA’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

He also rejects the idea of pitting library and police funding against one another. “We have a councilman who has kind of led a campaign against providing funding to our local library, and I personally believe a public library is for everybody.”

Floyd said the funding was needed to hire an extra officer — among other things because the volatility of local politics now necessitates a police presence at previously “quite boring” public meetings.

The situation shows how culture-war battles previously playing out in school board meetings across the country have found a new front line: the public library.

The American Library Association reported in September that 2023 is on track to log the highest number of attempted library book bans since it began keeping data on book challenges 20 years ago. Where, last year, just 16% of book challenges were in public libraries, as opposed to school or university libraries, this year 49% were.

Last year, Akron Borough in Lancaster County halved its funding to the Ephrata library, as a statement of “conservative values,” according to WITF, the public media organization. Elsewhere, Montana library directors have resigned over book bans; Catholic activists in Michigan took it upon themselves to replace Pride Month displays with religious texts; a Virginia county cut library funding by 75%, citing sexually explicit materials; and the mayor of Anderson County, Tenn., asked the sheriff to investigate whether library materials violate criminal obscenity laws.

“That’s unfortunately what Telford became this year and I think it’s really unnecessary,” Floyd said. “We have other things we need to be focused on, like maintaining our public safety and infrastructure, and not getting tied up on these national issues.”

The Indian Valley Public Library on a September morning was a quiet hum of activity. In one corner of the converted school building, a life-sized Cat in the Hat presided over the colorful display of books and toys in the children’s section, where a few young children played under close supervision.

A game room, used by chess and bridge clubs, awaited its regulars, as did the shelves of cookbooks, the local-history section staffed by a librarian-genealogist, and, down a long corridor away from the children’s department, a small graphic-novel collection. Students and remote workers labored at desks in glassed-walled offices and meeting rooms. Nearby, staffers for Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick and state Sen. Maria Collett were holding office hours.

“This is actually very quiet,” said Margie Stern, who has been the library’s director for seven years. “We’re in between story times.”

The library, which has a $1.2 million annual budget, is part of the Montgomery County library system. Up until this year, Stern’s most pressing concern, like that of librarians across the country, was reining in the spiraling cost of ebooks.

Starting in March, all of that changed abruptly.

She attended a Telford Borough Council meeting that month, and was shocked by what she heard. People were saying, “‘The librarians were grooming. They were providing pornography. …. Then [Borough Councilmember Robert] Jacobus handed me this document, which sort of explained everything.”

Jacobus joined the Telford Borough Council last fall; his other endeavors have included running a Christian media company and marketing an ebook called Foretold, about Biblical prophecies that he says have been proven accurate through the use of satellite imagery and ground photography.

The document he gave Stern was a report, titled the Library Loophole, which claimed to prove that the library harbored “Pornographic, Obscene, ‘How to’ materials, and info facilitating sex trafficking.”

Within are photos of the library’s Pride Month displays; sex scenes clipped from books with queer themes, such as Fun Home, the coming-of-age memoir by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel; and a segment about hookup apps from This Book Is Gay, a sex education book that was among the nation’s most-banned last year, according to Pen America.

Jacobus said he is pro-library. “It’s just about bad people weaponizing the library to push their agenda on children.” He claimed that the children’s section contained “books that were challenging the children to investigate transgender materials, and teaching them how to do blow jobs and anal sex.”

Stern said his claims are ludicrous: She pointed out that the books Jacobus excerpted, though they depict same-sex relationships, are not pornography. None of the books is actually housed in the children’s section, she said, and no library staffers are handing those books to children. On the contrary, she said, library policies already do jibe with the primary argument of parental rights’ groups, that it’s up to them to decide what materials their children can access. The library requires parents of kids under 13 to remain in the building, and mandates that parents directly supervise any children under 10.

“I didn’t even know about Moms for Liberty,” she said, “and now my life is taken up with all of this.”

Since then, she said, men have shown up at the library “quoting Scripture,” including one who pushed librarians to read and distribute a stack of copies of his self-published book. (Stern contacted the police, who she said obligingly returned the books to the author.)

A visitor conducted a “First Amendment audit” that became confrontational when staff prevented the woman from videotaping a children’s program. In April, an 8 a.m. board meeting, according to minutes, attracted more than two dozen members of the public, either to raise concerns about “LGBTQ and BLM children’s books” and a “liberal agenda” or to speak in opposition. And, in August, a local church hosted a story hour there for Brave Books, a Christian publisher whose “See you at the library” events have, by design, sparked controversy elsewhere.

Now, though, Stern is grappling with an existential threat: The leaders of other supporting municipalities have seen Jacobus’ report, and some — including the leaders of Franconia Township, a larger community that provides about 20% of the library’s funding — said they have concerns. Whether they, too, might slash library funding in response is not yet clear.

“It’s more than just funding,” said Grey Godshall, chairman of the Franconia Board of Supervisors, who said he has heard from constituents on both sides of the issue. “It’s, specifically, access that young children would have to age-inappropriate material. From the township perspective, that’s what we’re looking at.”

Stern said Souderton also reduced its funding to the library in the last year — though its leaders said the cut was unrelated to the debates roiling other communities.

“We have reduced our hours,” she said, which mostly affects part-time staff. “We have reduced our book budget.”

For Telford, November’s borough council elections may be a turning point.

They are normally sleepy affairs, the winners raking in just a few hundred votes. But this year, Cimonetti is helping to campaign for two Democratic candidates, whose victory would represent a major upset in a borough that has traditionally been Republican-run. (Currently, there’s just one Democrat on the volunteer-run, seven-member council.)

Their Republican opponents are also anti-establishment — dominated by Jacobus’ slate of a far-right, Christian, Moms for Liberty-aligned candidates who call themselves Telford Tough. If they should win, along with incumbent Eric Kratz who has backed Jacobus in the library debate, they could have the clout to cut funding altogether.

One of the Democratic candidates is Meredith Torres, a mother of two and a program manager for an international travel assistance company. She said her first ever political campaign was motivated by what she viewed as extreme rhetoric.

“I would definitely characterize this as a decisive moment for the town,” she said — and arguably for the region. She believes that if Telford Tough can be defeated here, it could dissuade like-minded candidates in other towns from running similar campaigns. “It’s starting with [defunding] the library, with this whole idea that this is the required step to protect children in our community,” she said. “If that sort of falls then one wonders what are the next things they’re going to focus on?”

Against that backdrop, the ACLU of Pennsylvania’s legal director, Vic Walczak, said the warning letter from the Telford police chief to Cimonetti is particularly alarming. He said his outreach to the chief had not been acknowledged. (Floyd said he did return Cimonetti’s phone call, but never heard back.)

“The fact that they will not respond and identify precisely what speech [of hers] they think is criminal, I think just clarifies that this really was an illegal effort to intimidate,” he said. “It’s alarming to see a police department put its thumb on the scale in a debate between two different views of America.”

Kaitlin Derstine, one of two Moms for Liberty members mentioned in the chief’s letter, and a supporter of the Telford Tough platform, said the truth is much simpler: “We are tired of the harassment and threatening that has taken place over the last several years. People in our community have shared fears for their jobs and businesses,” she said in a statement.

At the library’s monthly board meeting in September, the trustees turned their discussion to marketing — a Change.org petition in favor of library funding, a series of letters to the editor, and 250 yard signs with QR codes linking to the library’s website. Much of it was driven by a new strategist the library brought on last year who, as trustee Steve Boell put it, immediately “became a wartime consigliere.”

Boell — a zoning lawyer and library enthusiast from Franconia — said the goal was counterprogramming, “to show that there’s a silent majority out there that supports the library.”

Stern, the library director, said the lawn signs would have been part of the plans irrespective of the pitched political battles, part of an effort to hang on to its share of municipal funding as American Relief Plan Act money has dried up.

But Stern acknowledged that the timing is no coincidence.

“We know Telford Tough is going to be putting their signs up soon, so we want to flood the area with some positive stuff. We’re trying to get out ahead of the election,” she said. “As a library, we don’t support any candidates. We can’t do that. But we do support the library.”

Staff writer Maddie Hanna contributed to this article.