The culture wars came to St. Charles with a vengeance this week. Tuesday's raucous meeting of the St. Charles County library board featured hundreds of residents furiously debating each other over ... what? The legacy of the recently departed novelist Cormac McCarthy? The relative literary merits of John Steinbeck versus Toni Morrison?

No, no — something way more literarily consequential: A library clerk who was spotted wearing makeup, nail polish and a goatee, and the immense danger that sight allegedly posed to one library patron's young son.

There was something chilling about the way the confrontation veered from the issue of appropriate attire to parents demanding that supposedly pornographic — though oddly unspecified — books be pulled from the library shelves. Some of them cited Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft's recent, demagogic move to bring libraries around the state under his thumb.

You know that "slippery slope" that free-speech advocates are always harping about? It's getting steeper and steeper underneath Missouri's libraries.

The controversy started last month, when a woman at the library with her 4-year-old son complained on social media of having seen a library clerk "dressed in drag" at the Kathryn Linnemann branch of the library in St. Charles. That led to a protest by the woman and about 30 supporters, who were demanding a stricter dress code for library system employees, and a larger protest by about 60 counter-protesters defending the clerk.

On Tuesday, some 350 people crammed into the St. Charles County library board meeting to resume the debate, with counter-protesters again appearing to outnumber the protesters. As reported by the Post-Dispatch's Ethan Colbert, protesters described the library clerk as having worn a leather corset, fishnet stockings, and four-inch stilettos — eye-popping details that, oddly, weren't mentioned in the initial complaint.

Francis Howell School Board member Jane Puszkar accused the clerk of "wanting to harm our children by exposing them to things they don't understand," and called for firing the library CEO and removing County Executive Steve Ehlmann's ability to appoint library board members.

Mark McCloskey, the St. Louis front-yard-gun-waver and failed U.S. Senate candidate, was there to allege the library system was harboring books that "would land any adult in prison for reading." (List, please?)

Others wielded Bible quotations, including one suggesting the killing of those who "fall into sin." Yet there's something decidedly unChristian about hounding and persecuting a library clerk who has done nothing to them except, as the clerk's partner put it at the meeting, "exist."

While local communities should have a say in things like attire standards in public facilities, that doesn't supersede First Amendment rights of speech and expression. And what happened to common-sense perspective? A nude library clerk would be one thing. But all this over a library clerk in mascara? Really?

Would this reaction to a little nail polish have happened even five years ago? We suspect that even most conservatives back then would have rolled their eyes and gone on with their lives.

But today, in the depths of the culture wars, no controversy is passed up. This dark phenomenon has already encircled issues like health care and classroom curriculum. Now they're coming for the libraries. This should worry all reasonable Americans — no matter what they're wearing.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Photo credit: Emil Widlund at Unsplash