Several dozen people attended a Fairhope Library Board meeting Monday afternoon after months of conflict over books with LGBTQ themes and their place in the library’s catalog.

After the room reached its 25-person capacity, many attendees stood in the hall, observing the meeting through the doorway and stepping in to speak one by one.

“I think we can all agree that we want safe spaces for our children to learn and grow in,” said Dr. Jennifer Walker, a local pediatrician and Fairhope resident. “The idea of a library banning books based on a specific organization’s opinions is antithetical to the idea of our library being one of those spaces.”

Rev. Jenny Allen, a retired United Methodist minister, spoke in support of the library and “letting people be the parents of their children,” rather than relying on the library to make decisions on what its patrons read.

“It’s the hardest thing we do as human beings, is raise people,” she said. “I don’t believe it’s anyone’s duty to demean someone because of what they believe, because each one of us chooses what we choose to believe.”

The library board meeting came highly anticipated by advocates after a contentious Fairhope city council meeting last month drew more than 100 people concerned about the library. That meeting concluded with Jay Robinson, the president of the city council informing residents that, while the council was appreciative of the civic engagement, library book selection is an issue for the library board.

Many of the people who attended that council meeting showed up at the library board on Monday, including Brian A. Dasinger, a local attorney and representative of the Faith Family Freedom Coalition of Baldwin County, a chapter of the organization that advocated against Mobile annexation because of their opposition to Mobile’s actions supporting LGBTQ people.

At both meetings, he urged the library to move certain books with themes of sexuality, LGBTQ topics and race from the sections of the library serving youth to the adult sections. Dasinger emphasized that he and his group “are not trying to ban books.”

“To me, if you read it and you have common sense as an adult, you just know that this is not something that a child should be reading, and you know, quite frankly, it’s quite offensive to me,” he said.

Dasinger referenced Miller v. California, a 1973 Supreme Court case that established how obscenity is determined in state and federal law based on a triple pronged test, as a mechanism for the library to consider books.

One requirement of the Miller Test, according to the Legal Information Institute, requires that the work, “taken as a whole,” lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

“I haven’t read the books, but I have seen excerpts,” Dasinger said. “It’s common sense that children should not be exposed to this.”

The library board’s city council liaison, Councilman Jimmy Conyers, attended the meeting.

“It’s challenging for me,” said Conyers, a nonvoting member of the board. “I got a lot of friends and constituents who believe differently than me, and I think libraries need to stay neutral and apolitical. I feel this has the feel of being a political challenge.”

Tamara Dean, the library’s director, listed 33 books that are in the process of being reviewed. The location in the library is being reconsidered for some of those books, and some books are being challenged altogether, according to Andy Parvin, the board’s vice chairman.

AL.com obtained a copy of the list of books submitted for review. Of the 55 books on that list, eight are not carried in the Fairhope location, one is not carried in any Baldwin County libraries and 14 are not cataloged in the teen section of the library, according to a search of the library’s catalog in September.

According to the library, those 33 books combined have been checked out less than 500 times over 15 years.

Following the meeting, Dean said she was pleased with the direction the meeting had gone.

“It went very well,” she said. “I was so happy to hear both sides. It’s a wonderful community we live in.”

The library has not yet decided on whether to keep the challenged books in circulation and has not announced a date they plan to release a decision.