A US man who pushed to ban several LGBTQ books from public schools now faces a felony charge for second-degree child molestation. He is also facing a misdemeanor charge of attempting to show pornographic material to a minor in a separate case.
The accused, 29-year-old Ryan Utterback from a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, appeared for a hearing on Thursday, according to KMBC-TV. According to court documents, the felony charges relate to separate incidents in 2020 – when he allegedly touched a 12-year-old girl under her clothes and rubbed a teen’s leg underneath her jeans.
The misdemeanor case alleges that Utterback used his cellphone to show pornographic video footage to a child, beginning from when she was around four. He also faces another misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree domestic assault. The second hearing will reportedly take place in March.
The charges came after he and other parents complained at a North Kansas City School District board meeting last year about “pornographic” LGBTQ-themed books on school shelves. At the meeting in October, Utterback held up enlarged prints of two pages from the graphic memoir ‘Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic’, while another parent argued that distributing the material amounted to “solicitation of a minor.”