Former Arkansas State Sen. Jason Rapert Photo: Screenshot
Jason Rapert, the Christian Nationalist that Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) appointed to her state’s library board late last year, is now complaining that his fellow board members should be “tarred and feathered” because they won’t support his crusade to remove LGBTQ+ books—or “pornographic” “smut,” as he calls it—from local schools and libraries. In fact, he said the state library board should be eliminated altogether.
“I serve on the Arkansas Library Board,” Rapert said in a recent episode of his Save The Nation broadcast. “I cannot get those other board members to take a stand to stop some of the smut that is in those libraries. It’s ridiculous. I’ve made motions trying to do it.”
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“The Bible says, ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,’” he said. “Well, when you have leaders that are not allowing the nation to be blessed of God, they’re not doing godly things, you need to replace them, get rid of them, get them out of office, put people back in there that will. You’ve got schools where they’re fighting over allowing homosexual, LGBTQ material to be utilized to groom children. … There needs to be people that will take up and sue anybody that is allowing that sort of thing to go on in our school districts and in our libraries.”
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Rapert’s use of the word “groom” refers to acalculated and gradual process by which someone gains the trust of a child and their family in order to sexually abuse the child. Anti-LGBTQ+ people commonly accuse queers and their allies of “grooming kids,” but the accusers neither ally with organizations that actually fight child sex abuse nor publicly comment on the thousands of cases of actual child sex abuse that continue to occur in Christian churches.
While Rapert and other Republican politicians have claimed that book bans seek to keep children from accessing “sexually-explicit” content, authors whose books are targeted by these bans are most frequently female, people of color, and/or LGBTQ+ individuals, according to the free-speech organization PEN America. Approximately 30% of the banned titles from the 2022-2023 school year included either characters of color or discussions of race and racism, and an additional 30% included LGBTQ+ characters or themes, the organization added.
“When you don’t protect children in America, you have no business serving in a public official’s role,” he continued. “You have no business serving on a board, you have no business serving in a state legislature, you have no business being an elected official at any level if you’re not going to protect children. When you get to a point that you’re so confused and you’re so completely jaded that you cannot make a decision to keep smut or pornographic stuff [away from] children, you’ve lost your ever-loving mind and you need to be replaced—you need to be taken out.”
The phrase “taken out” can sometimes mean “removed from a position” but is also a euphemism for “killed or murdered.”
“Some people say, ‘Oh, he’s talking about violence.’ No, I’m not talking about violence,” Rapert claimed. “You need to be run out on a rail. You probably should be tarred and feathered. That’s what they used to do in America is they would tar and feather those kind of folks. Get rid of them. Teach them a lesson. Get them out of office.”
The term “run out on a rail” can refer to running someone out of town. It also refers to a form of mob punishment that was prevalent in the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. The punishment involved forcing an offender to sit on a wooden plank or “rail” hoisted into the air by carriers and then paraded through the community. The offender was sometimes publicly mocked, attacked or literally tarred and feathered before being dumped by the roadside. The punishment was meant to publicly humiliate, isolate, and socially banish the individual.
As for tarring and feathering, it can refer to severely criticizing or punishing someone, but it also refers to a form of vigilante public torture that originated in the U.S. as a way to scare off British tax collectors. During the 19th and 20th centuries it was often used against educators, Black Americans, and their supporters by Christian Nationalist white supremacists. While the toxic tar used in the punishment is not always hot, it can still cause serious bodily injury, poisoning, illness, and death.
Even if Rapert was using the violent language figuratively, his rhetoric echoes those of other Republicans and Christian Nationalists who have used dehumanizing language while calling for their political opponents to be figuratively attacked and murdered.
“I am at a point now where it’s going to take so long to get new board members on [the Arkansas State Library Board],” Rapert continued, “[that]if I were the legislature, I would run a bill just to abolishing the Arkansas State Library Board and let it be reconstituted. Put new people in there, or maybe they just need to call on people to resign if you’re not going to do your job.”
In a late 2023 interview, Rapert pledged to enforce a law known as Act 372, which would criminally prosecute librarians and bookstore owners who refuse to remove any books that are deemed as “harmful to minors,” a vague phrase that anti-LGBTQ+ activists often use to ban books with any mention of sexual orientation or gender identity. The law also makes it easier for any single person to challenge a book, effectively removing it from shelves while it undergoes review by library, county, or city officials.
A U.S. district judge issued a temporary injunction blocking the law on July 29, 2023 after numerous libraries, bookstores, associations, readers, and patrons sued. The challengers called the law badly written and vague and said that it violated readers’ and authors’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights to access and distribute content with unpopular views without undue government interference.
Nevertheless, Rapert has said he’ll use his new position to deny federal and state funds to any library that joined the successful lawsuit to block the law. This would include the Fayetteville Public Library, Eureka Springs Carnegie Library, the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS), and possibly libraries where various individual librarians joined the lawsuit. Collectively, these institutions serve hundreds of thousands of readers in the state.
