It seems that mere book bans no longer provide the feverish culture-war buzz some Republicans crave. GOP lawmakers in several states are instead escalating matters by laying the groundwork for the prosecution of librarians. Last week, the West Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill that would remove protections from criminal liability for schools, public libraries, and museums that distribute or display “obscene matter” to a minor, when the minor’s parent or guardian is not present. Those found guilty of violating the law could receive fines of up to $25,000 and face up to five years in prison.
Supported by all 85 of the state’s House Republican members and now up for consideration in the GOP-controlled Senate, House Bill 4654 is short on specifics. What constitutes obscenity, according to the West Virginia state code, includes material that “an average person, applying community standards, would find depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexually explicit conduct; and a reasonable person would find, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” But the text of the bill fails to address how it would treat museums that feature nude paintings or sculptures and libraries that offer books that include even the most benign depictions or definitions of sexual conduct. “It is going to cost our counties and our librarians when these matters go to the court system,” Sean Hornbuckle, a Democrat and the minority leader of the West Virginia House, said in an interview with The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. “Because this is still vague, I’m scared…. This is a very dangerous bill.” Along with the West Virginia House, Republicans control the governorship and the state’s Senate.
Of course, the ambiguity could be the point. “The bill is designed to create confusion for educators about what kinds of materials can be taught or displayed,” the West Virginia chapter of the ACLU wrote in a post on X. Other similarly opaque laws formed during the latest wave of conservative cultural paranoia have led to educators second-guessing every book they assign or make available to students. In Florida, even dictionaries were pulled from some school shelves—“intercourse,” after all, is a word presumably defined in most Merriam-Webster editions.
School librarians are also under threat in Georgia. There, state senators have advanced a proposal requiring school libraries to inform parents of every book their child borrows. A separate pending proposal, Senate Bill 154, would subject school librarians to criminal charges for distributing “harmful materials to minors.” Teachers in the state are already subject to such penalties.
Meanwhile, in some blue states, many are working on measures to counter these radical, anti-education laws. The Maryland General Assembly, for instance, is weighing a bill—dubbed the Freedom to Read Act—that would protect librarians from disciplinary and retaliatory measures related to the materials they offer. It would also push back against attempted book bans, noting libraries should not “prohibit or remove material from its catalogue because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”
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