The New York Times Gift Article: “County officials in Wyoming fired Terri Lesley, a library director, after she refused to purge children and young adult books that contained sexual content and L.G.B.T.Q. themes. A library director in Wyoming who was fired two years ago because she refused to remove books with sexual content and L.G.B.T.Q. themes from a library’s children and young adult sections was awarded $700,000 in a settlement on Wednesday. Terri Lesley, the former director of the Campbell County Public Library in Gillette, Wyo., filed a federal lawsuit in April for defamation and the violation of her civil rights against the county, its board of commissioners, the library board and individual members of both government boards. The lawsuit accused them of violating her First Amendment right to free speech, and of firing Ms. Lesley in a retaliatory and discriminatory way. She had worked for the local library system since 1996 and directed the system for about 11 years. “I am just thrilled by this opportunity to put it behind me; it was quite an experience,” Ms. Lesley said in an interview on Thursday.  “I don’t regret standing up for the First Amendment in any way,” she continued, “but it was kind of a brutal process to experience it, to have it be such a contentious issue, and for it to be across the country and be called things like a ‘pedophile’ or a ‘child groomer.’ Those things were all very hard to experience.” Ms. Lesley found herself in the middle of a dispute in 2021 over which books belonged on the county library’s shelves — a debate that has been playing out across communities and school boards, as so-called book bans have surged in the United States. In June that year, the library highlighted L.G.B.T.Q. books to mark Pride Month. The book challenges came soon afterward. About 25 books were targeted, including titles like “This Book is Gay” by Juno Dawson, “How Do You Make a Baby” by Anna Fiske, “Period Power” by Nadya Okamoto, “Doing It” by Hannah Witton, “Sex is a Funny Word” by Corey Silverberg, and “Dating and Sex: A Guide for the 21st Century Teen Boy” by Andrew P. Smiler. Many of those books had been on the shelves in the children’s or young adult’s sections for years before Ms. Lesley heard any complaints, she said. Some people behind the challenges took issue with the placement of the books. One resident told the county library board that the L.G.B.T.Q. books should be moved to the library’s adult section to protect the emotional, physical and mental health of children, as reported by the Gillette News Record. But Ms. Lesley resisted the calls to move or remove the books. “If you segregate these books, say, in the adult section, and you’re teenager, and you go to try to find something on a topic and that book isn’t there, you won’t discover it,” she said on Thursday. “That is a form of censorship….”