A Missouri man who tried to ban LGBTQ books from North Kansas City Schools libraries over images of sexual acts is now facing a felony charge of second-degree child molestation.
Ryan Utterback, a 29-year-old parent, is also facing a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree domestic assault. In a separate case, he's facing a misdemeanor charge of furnishing or attempting to furnish pornographic material to a minor.
According to court documents, Utterback allegedly touched a 12-year-old girl under her clothes and in a separate instance, rubbed a teenager's leg underneath her jeans, both in 2020.
Another case in 2021 alleged that he showed pornographic videos to a child starting from when she was around 4 years old.
Utterback is due back in court on March 10.
He spoke at a school board meeting in November, according to KMBC-TV, an ABC affiliate, and tried to get books that showed sexual acts in North Kansas City Schools libraries removed.
At a previous school board meeting in October, he held up enlarged prints of two pages of the award-winning graphic memoir “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic," and argued with a member of the parent association while they were speaking, saying that giving that type of reading material to a child amounts to “solicitation of a minor.”
Half of the top 20 most challenged and banned books of the decade spanning 2010-19 had some form of LGBTQ verbiage in their titles, according to the American Library Association.
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, told NBC News in November that there's been a "chilling" uptick in the amount of challenges in the previous year.
“I’ve worked at ALA for two decades now, and I’ve never seen this volume of challenges come in,” Caldwell-Stone said.
Mary O’Hara, a rapid response manager at the LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD, said that literacy and education experts read challenged books in their entirety to determine if they are appropriate for schools, and the books are often returned to the book shelves.
“Book ban advocates have long tried to inaccurately claim that LGBTQ representation in books, films, TV and ads is ‘unsuitable’ or ‘obscene,’ while other media with narratives and themes about opposite-sex relationships — even those with graphic sex or violence — are not targeted,” O’Hara said.
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