Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders has appointed Jason Rapert, a Christian nationalist activist and former state senator to the state library board. Rapert was a zealously anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice lawmaker who ran for lieutenant governor last year but was defeated in the Republican primary.
Earlier this month, Rapert tweeted a long angry rant against the Democratic Party that claimed, “The Democrat Party is behind the radial LGBTQ insanity attacking our children through public libraries and activist teachers that are pushing homosexual pornography on minor children.” In a September rant he denounced the LGTBQ movement as a “devil of hell.”
According to the Arkansas Times, the state library “administers state and federal funds appropriated for libraries and library development” and is an “information resource center for state agencies, legislators and legislative staffs; provides guidance and support for the development of local public libraries and provides the resources, services, and leadership necessary to meet the educational, informational and cultural needs of the citizens of Arkansas.”
Rapert founded and leads the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, which promotes lawmakers and legislation that reflect Rapert’s “biblical worldview.” Rapert has credited NACL with passage of anti-trans legislation that Sanders signed into law this year. In a video celebrating that law’s passage, Rapert thundered:
We are fighting for the lives of little babies. We are fighting against the people that are putting the queer books into your school libraries and trying to groom these children into homosexuality. We’re standing up. We’re pursuing school board policies to save the nation. We are standing up and have our members running bills in the halls of the state legislatures to stand up against this woke ideology, to push back against the things of the devil in our country.
This summer, Arkansas state Sen. Dan Sullivan attended an NACL gathering at Liberty University and pledged to use the next state legislative session to strip funding for any library in the state that is affiliated with the American Library Association.
On a podcast produced by Liberty University’s Standing for Freedom Center last year, Rapert said that right-wing Christians must rise up and “take authority” over everything from their local school boards to the federal government.
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