This is an opinion column.
There’s some steamy stuff in Alabama’s bill to turn librarians into pornographers.
Stuff I don’t want to say out loud. So I’ll let those Alabama lawmakers speak of the acts on their minds.
There’s “sexual intercourse, masturbation, urination, defecation, lewd exhibition of the genitals, sadomasochistic abuse, bestiality, or the fondling of the sex organs of animals.” There’s “any other physical contact with a person’s unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks, or the breast or breasts of a female, whether alone or between members of the same or opposite sex or between a human and an animal, in an act of sexual stimulation, gratification, or perversion.”
Kinky. Whew. Don’t Google that when you get home, kids.
And whatever you do, don’t bring a copy of this bill – HB385 – into a school library. If this thing passes, that would very likely be a crime.
Because under the bill – brought to you by a whole Upright Citizens Brigade of 31 Alabama legislators – a school or public librarian who allowed such pages into a library might well be charged for turning the library into a public nuisance.
Not unlike the Legislature itself.
The bill, modifying an existing law designed to suppress the proliferation of “adult-only video stores” and adult book stores, would make school librarians liable for any of “sexual content” appearing in any book, magazine, newspaper, printed or written matter, writing, description, picture, drawing, animation, photograph, motion picture, film, video tape, pictorial representation, depiction, image, electrical or electronic reproduction, broadcast, transmission, telephone communication, sound recording, article, device, equipment, matter, oral communication, live performance, or dance.”
So this column might be considered obscene, too. It appears as written matter. And it quotes legislators about sex with animals, and their oddly colorful discussion of “binding or physical restraining of a person who is nude or clad in undergarments or in a revealing or bizarre costume in an act of sexual stimulation.”
So specific. And yet so very broad.
It would be hard to take this bill seriously if it weren’t such a serious attack on thought, and expression, if it did not seek to criminalize an important, service-oriented profession. If it did not seek to stop people from acknowledging alternative views. If it were not designed to manufacture fear, and use that fear to silence other people.
The bill, which passed a House committee Wednesday, also uses this so-called war on obscenity to shut down drag shows in libraries or other public places.
It would ban “any sexual or gender oriented material that knowingly exposes minors to persons who are dressed in sexually revealing, exaggerated, or provocative clothing or costumes, or are stripping, or engaged in lewd or lascivious dancing, presentations, or activities in K-12 public schools, public libraries, and other public places where minors are expected and are known to be present without parental consent.”
I’m not sure what “exaggerated” clothing is, but don’t wear it in a library. Or you will be likened to an adult video store.
The bill assumes so much. It would declare stuff obscene if “a reasonable person would find that the material, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
By that measure it would be reasonable to declare half the Alabama Code obscene.
The Alabama Library Association and librarians across the state have argued that the bill reaches too far, is an affront to free speech and parental rights, and threatens everything from sex education books to the Bible itself.
But of course lawmakers are not concerned with sex education in a state that remains among the top 10 for both teen birth rate and sexually transmitted diseases. What’s a real health threat when you can foment your own?
As for the Bible, well, it certainly violates a lot of the standards laid out in this bill. There’s more about prostitutes and rape and incest in the Book of Genesis than anything you’re likely to read in a school library.
Like when Lot’s daughters got him drunk and slept with him.
Like Genesis 38:8-10, where a dude named Onan is told to sleep with his brother’s wife. But Onan was condemned to die because “whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother.”
Or the lady in Ezekiel who “lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.”
Could a librarian be arrested for shelving the Bible where minors can find it? Those are pretty vivid descriptions of the workings of sex, on paper, in violation of the law.
You might argue that it’s all out of context. That the passages don’t represent the whole of the work.
And that’s the point.
That’s the problem.
Because context plays no role in determining the value of any of these works. This bill, this purge, lets the most fearful parents and the most fear-mongering legislators control what other families can read, or see, or decide. It misrepresents what is being read in libraries in the first place and demeans librarians.
It assumes the censors have the moral high ground. Even when their minds are the ones in the gutter.
