Sex in the Library

Since last I wrote there’s been some good news on the library front, at least here in Georgia. S.B. 390, which would have severed the state’s relationship with the ALA failed in the senate. S.B. 394, the “Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Education Resources (READER) Act,” and S.B. 154, which would have criminalized librarians and other public servants accused of distributing “harmful materials to minors,” didn’t receive votes and so won’t become law this year.

Additionally, according to the AP, H.B. 1104, which would have banned transgender girls from playing high school sports, banned sex education in fifth grade and below, and “required a system for notifying parents of every item a child obtained in a school library,” also failed in the senate and won’t become law this year. So, for the time being, public libraries and public schools in Georgia remain relatively free from increased state censorship for the next year or so, but that doesn’t mean the war on libraries is over.

In fact, last month also saw the emergence, in Louisiana, of one of the more unsettling bills criminalizing librarians we’ve seen this year. Like other anti-library bills, Louisiana H.B. 777 “prohibits officials and public employees from using public funds for transactions with the American Library Association” and provides criminal penalties of “not more than one thousand dollars or imprison[ment], with or without hard labor, for not more than two years, or both.”

That’s right: Librarians in Louisiana might be sentenced to hard labor for purchasing services or resources from the ALA (the largest and oldest professional organization of librarians in the world) with public money. This is only the latest step in a state that has already implemented many policies in line with the censors’ wildest dreams.

After the Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry released his “Protecting Innocence” report in 2023, the governor signed S.B. 7. According to the Louisiana Illuminator, this bill “requires libraries to create a card system so parents can prevent their children from checking out books deemed inappropriate. Libraries will also have to adopt policy language to limit minors’ access to material that describes ‘sexual conduct,’ which the new law defines in five paragraphs.” As we’ve seen in the case of Georgia’s “divisive concepts” law, the state’s definition of depictions of “sexual conduct” is simultaneously narrow and wide enough to allow targeted and broad range applications.

Further, and more to the point, the bill and its definitions offer no consideration of the context wherein such depictions might be perfectly appropriate, say for older readers or for the purposes of education. Instead, they create a licensing system to relieve parents of the burden of taking an interest in their children’s lives and pass that authority on to the state, which is the first step toward disempowering, even criminalizing, educators and librarians, and another chink in the armor of free speech as emboldened censors take aim at publishers, authors, and even bookstores.

Of course, there are those who rightly point out that libraries can’t and don’t carry everything; that there are plenty of books (e.g., on holocaust denial, in support of white supremacy, etc.) that we’re perfectly happy restricting from the library; and that it’s quite reasonable to want to prevent children from accessing material deemed inappropriate for them. As Matthew Walther emphasizes, and many other conservatives argue, it’s not even really appropriate to call books prohibited, restricted, or otherwise challenged in public schools or public libraries “banned.” They’re readily available online, in bookstores, and often even continue to appear in the library catalogues of the schools where they’re “banned.” And, of course, “banned books” are frequently assigned in high school and college classrooms. Moreover, Walther and his ilk contend, none of the authors of these books have faced criminal prosecution or had their rights infringed by those who have challenged their works in public schools or public libraries.

So, why should the public library shelve books with graphic sexual content that patrons, parents, or even library boards deem offensive, inappropriate, or prove otherwise at odds with so-called community standards? One answer comes from the Supreme Court, and it errs on the side of the First Amendment against would-be censors.

In fact, the only time the court heard a case bearing directly on the question of whether school or library boards might restrict or prohibit content occurred in 1982. In Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico, a student named Steven Pico solicited the help of the ALA to bring suit against the Island Trees school board after they removed nine books from the high school library. Among the books were Slaughterhouse Five and Go Ask Alice, but most of them delt with race, a particularly hot topic in the library culture wars of that moment.   

When asked whether “the Board’s decision to ban certain books from its junior high and high school libraries … violate[d] the First Amendment’s freedom of speech protections,” the court ruled

that as centers for voluntary inquiry and the dissemination of information and ideas, school libraries enjoy a special affinity with the rights of free speech and press. Therefore, the board could not restrict the availability of books in its libraries simply because its members disagreed with their idea content.

As Justice Brennan explains in the court’s plurality opinion, the question rests on the intention of the book banners. In other words, school boards may, of course, make decisions about the appropriateness of texts for their libraries, but they may not do so in an intentionally ideological way. Brennan writes,

Our Constitution does not permit the official suppression of ideas. Thus, whether petitioners' removal of books from their school libraries denied respondents their First Amendment rights depends upon the motivation behind petitioners' actions. If petitioners intended by their removal decision to deny respondents access to ideas with which petitioners disagreed, and if this intent was the decisive factor in petitioners' decision, then petitioners have exercised their discretion in violation of the Constitution. 

In this way, the texts under discussion, LGBTQ+ texts of various kinds, books with depictions of race labeled CRT or DEI, and other works lumped together in Moms for Liberty’s BookLook.info “Public Book Reports” are subject to exactly the kind of ideological suppression Brennan describes. In Louisiana, for example, the emphasis of Attorney General Landry’s report on sexual explicitness masks the ideological motivation to restrict the ideas present in these books. Plenty of other books could have exemplified the charge of depicting sexual conduct, but Gender Queer, Flamer, and The Bluest Eye, did. And not by accident.

As Pico put it in an interview with the National Coalition Against Censorship, “I’ve long assumed most book banners are well-intentioned individuals who wish to protect children. Their method is unconstitutional and incompatible with life in a pluralistic nation. Does ignorance protect children or does ignorance leave young people unprepared and defenseless?” These were the questions before the court in Pico, and they are the questions we continue to face today. After the Pico decision, we’d see these questions again put to the test against an another LGBTQ+ book, Annie on My Mind. Next month, we’ll have a look at that case and its prescient legacy today.