(Radio Iowa) – Governor Kim Reynolds says if a book is banned in one school district, state law should require that all Iowa schools get a parent’s permission before letting a student see it. Reynolds spoke last night (Thursday night) at a town hall event organized by Moms for Liberty, a conservative parents’ rights group. “Thank you for speaking out, for your refusal to stand quietly by as we’ve seen the radical left treat our kids like their personal property. Not on your watch, not on my watch, not on our watch!” Reynolds said, to cheers.

Local members of Moms for Liberty have led efforts to remove books they consider obscene from Iowa school libraries. They also support a bill to ban materials or instruction about gender identity in kindergarten through eighth grade classrooms and another that would require parents be notified if their child asks to be known by a different name or gender at school. “You’re fighting for the fundamental principle that parents are the primary decision makers for their children,” Reynolds said, to cheers.

Protesters who shouted and waved a transgender flag at one point during the governor’s remarks were escorted out by police. A small group of Republican legislators also spoke at the event and answered questions from the crowd.

(Red Oak, Iowa) – Sheriff’s officials in Montgomery County report a man was arrested Thursday night in Stanton, on an active Montgomery County warrant. Rex Sebeniecher was taken into custody at around 9:30-p.m in the 600 block of Meadow Avenue in Stanton, on a warrant charging him with two counts of Assault (Both are simple misdemeanors). Sebeniecher was being held in the Montgomery County Jail on a $300 cash bond.

(Radio Iowa) – A state employee who has guided millions of visitors through the Iowa Capitol building is retiring. January 23, 1976 was Joan Arnett’s first day as an Iowa Capitol tour guide. “After I had worked here for about three days I filled out an application and I began my career here,” Arnett told Radio Iowa. Now, 47 years later, this is Arnett’s last day on the job.

“My children asked me a few days ago — they were here taking a tour, believe it or not — and they said: ‘What are you going to do on your last day, mom?’ And I said, ‘Cry.’ It’s going to be very hard to leave here,” Arnett said. “But I feel like I leave the building in good hands. There are a lot of people that have a lot of passion about this building and hopefully that will carry through into future generations.”

About 75-thousand people sign up for tours through the building each year. Many arrive on school buses. “A lot of our visitors start very young,” Arnett says. “We hope that they come back again and again, so it’s really not so much about learning facts about the building as learning that this is their building, that they’re always welcome here.” The Iowa Capitol is 137 years old and tour guides lead visitors all the way up to what’s called the whispering gallery. It’s a narrow passageway inside the golden dome that’s 275 feet above the ground. Arnett is also fascinated by areas that aren’t on the public tours — the attics and the space that’s a story below the basement.

“We see the pretty parts all day every day, but we never think about what it takes to support that,” Arnett says,” and there’s just a lot behind the scenes.” For the past 25 years, Arnett has been the supervisor of all the guides who lead tours of the building six days a week. For decades, the Capitol tour guides operated from a small desk on the edge of the first floor rotunda — with a narrow, three story closet to store pamphlets about the Capitol and other supplies.

“We eventually added another desk” she says. “Of couse we added a computer and eventually we moved down here to the ground floor.” The ground floor is where visitors enter the building and find the tour guides, as well as souvenirs and a collection of artifacts found over the past 40 years during restoration of the Capitol. Arnett says she often thinks about the four men who were in charge of constructing the Capitol in Des Moines.

“I think the most amazing part is that they had the foresight to think beyond their years and they didn’t just think: ‘We’re going to build a building that people will be proud of today.’ They said: ‘We’re going to build a building that people would be proud of 1000 years from now,'” Arnett says, “and I think they accomplished that.” Former State Representative Chuck Gipp of Decorah led the Capitol restoration effort during his 18 years in the legislature and he credits Arnett for helping to make the Capitol a welcoming place for visitors.

(Radio Iowa) – Iowa’s attorney general has signaled she would likely join a multi-state lawsuit if major pharmacy chains start selling abortion pills by mail. Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird has not issued a written statement of her own, but has added her signature to letters from attorneys general in Missouri and Alabama. One of the letters Bird and 19 other Republicans signed says as state attorneys general, it is their responsibility to protect the health, safety, and well-being of women and unborn children in their states.

The letters to Walgreens and C-V-S come after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced women seeking abortion pills could get them through the mail.

A bill has been introduced in the state legislature that would ban sending abortion pills through the mail in Iowa. Medication abortion has been available in the United States for 23 years. The most recent data indicates nearly 80 percent of abortions in Iowa in 2020 were induced by medication. About a dozen other states now ban abortion pills.