Know Your Enemy!
Karen Jo Gounaud
Family Friendly Libraries
7597 Whisperwood Court
Springfield, VA 22153
Phone and FAX 703/440-9419
Church FAX: 703/425-0205
Though Family Friendly Libraries (FFL) publicly portrays its mission as broadly altruistic and concerned with all aspects of children's education and development, its motivating force and unifying obsession is the fear that public libraries are a vehicle for homosexual indoctrination. Now in its infancy as a national organization, FFL grew out of battles in Fairfax County, Virginia over free distribution of the Washington Blade, a D.C. gay weekly, and the presence of "pro-homosexual" literature in local libraries. During this struggle, which began in about 1992, Karen Jo Gounaud rose quickly to prominence as a fierce and tenacious opponent of the so-called gay agenda. The wife of a retired Air Force officer and mother of two grown children, Gounaud is an evangelical Christian who holds a degree in education from the University of Nebraska. It was she who mobilized Christian parents of Fairfax county in an effort to end the availability of the Blade in the lobbies of branch libraries; led a drive to drop or sequester books she considers harmful to children; and pressured the Fairfax library system into spending a chunk of its budget on obscure and in some cases self-published books with titles like Steps Out of Homosexuality and You Don't Have to Be Gay. Her influence, long felt throughout northern Virginia, is beginning to have national impact. Her statements on the evils of spending taxpayers' money on "the type of books people don't want" bear depressing similarities to pronouncements that have badly eroded public support for the National Endowment for the Arts. Her campaign to demonize the American Library Association is beginning to see results, with some local library systems rewriting the Library Bill of Rights to eliminate all provisions that condemn censorship and uphold freedom of expression. While much of Gounaud's dogma can be traced to Focus on the Family and the rabidly homophobic Family Research Council, she has received major tactical and (we think) financial support from the Christian Coalition. The event that launched Family Friendly Libraries as a national entity was a conference held in Cincinnati on October 21, 1995 at the invitation of Phil Burress, founder of the militantly anti-gay, pro-censorship Citizens for Community Values (CCV), the Christian Coalition's Cincinnati affiliate. A newsletter is promised; write for literature.