In June 2020, JK Rowling posted a tweet that made her a target of trans rights activists to this day. The ACLU-NH’s Transgender Justice Organizer, Palana Belken, who identifies as transgender, tweeted in response from his now-deleted Twitter account that he was removing all the books from Rowling’s Harry Potter series from his shelves and threatened to burn them.
Related: ACLU-NH Trans Justice Organizer: Burn Books, Throw People out of Protests
Belken then followed through on his threat and tweeted a picture of a burning Harry Potter book and tagged Rowling.
Related: ACLU-NH Trans Justice Organizer Burns Books to Celebrate Candidate’s Birthday
In September 2020, Palana tweeted that he would burn his Harry Potter books all over again if he hadn’t already burned them, and referenced my GraniteGrok op-eds about the book burning.
Related: Book-Burning ACLU-NH Trans Justice Organizer Axed
In November 2020, Belken was fired by the ACLU-NH. The ACLU-NH waited five months to fire their book-burning staff member, presumably so he could be interviewed as an example of “voting while trans” and help promote the ACLU-NH’s resources for trans-identified voters.
In the last few years, the ACLU-NH has been lobbying against NH bills they disingenuously refer to as “book bans,” which are in reality written to help parents get age-inappropriate books removed from school libraries. The books would still be available at homes, online stores, brick-and-mortar bookstores, and in public libraries. They wouldn’t remotely be banned.
A 2023 ACLU-NH and GLAD press release said, “Any suggestion that books be banned frays the bonds of trust and cooperation among parents, schools, and students.” The book Gender Queer, mentioned in the press release, is so age-inappropriate that multiple parents have been shut down at school board meetings for reading from it. See excerpts from Gender Queer.
Fast forward to 2026, SB434, relative to regulation of public school materials, was a bill to help parents get pornographic materials removed from NH school libraries. SB434 passed the NH Senate and House and made it to Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s desk. The ACLU-NH lobbied hard for her to veto it. They arranged a sit-in to read “banned books” outside Gov. Ayotte’s office and they delivered a basket of supposedly banned books to the governor, which included a Harry Potter book because they wanted the governor to believe that Harry Potter could be banned under SB434, which is completely false.
I thought it was a bizarre choice to deliver a Harry Potter book to the governor since their own staff member publicly admitted to burning his entire collection of Harry Potter books and was still employed by the ACLU-NH for five months afterward. If I were the ACLU-NH, I would be too embarrassed to bring up Harry Potter books again, but they are apparently impervious to embarrassment.
And speaking of “book bans,” Gov. Ayotte still hasn’t nominated a replacement for the State Librarian, who retired at the end of Gov. Chris Sununu’s term. Mindy Atwood, the Administrator of Library Operations for the State Library, has been serving as the Acting State Librarian for a couple of years, but she cannot win approval to be State Librarian from the Executive Council because she pushes the book ban myth.
Related: Tell NH Executive Council to Reject Radical State Librarian Nominee
