EDITORIAL: The obscene effort to criminalize librarians

Teenagers and children are exposed to written material dealing with sexuality and related subjects that are inappropriate for readers of their ages, and parents have good reason to be concerned.

The source of this threat? It’s called the internet.

It’s an irony of these times. Any kid who knows how to operate a smart phone or other computer device—which is every kid—can find, accidentally or intentionally, words and images on the internet that are meant for adults, that are decadent or worse and are frequently false. But librarians are being targeted as purveyors of depravity for allowing certain books to be on their library shelves and accessible to young readers.

Book banning is the conservative project du jour, with a number a state legislatures passing or planning to pass virtually identical laws intended to ban a virtually identical list of books in school libraries and, in some cases, public libraries.

The Wisconsin Legislature has hopped on the book-banning bandwagon with several bills. One of them would provide for prosecution of school librarians for allowing books deemed obscene to be available in their libraries.

It would be a stretch to conclude that the legally accepted definition of “obscene,” written by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1973 ruling, fits any of the books mentioned by supporters of library restrictions at a recent hearing. But most of the objectionable books were on a list compiled by a website that scans books for words related to sex and has been cited in book-banning efforts in a number of states.

Backers of the librarian-prosecution bill surely know it is unlikely that any books found on the shelves of school libraries meet the obscenity test. Clearly, the intent of the bill is to intimidate librarians into removing books some parents do not want students to read.

Book banning is like all forms of censorship: The censors are not content to merely avoid reading whatever it is they object to; they want the power to decide what others read.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, described recent attempts to ban books as “a direct attack on every person’s constitutionally protected right to freely choose what books to read and what ideas to explore.”

Book-banning efforts that target librarians denigrate and threaten professionals who are trained to assemble book collections that represent a variety of topics and viewpoints. For their work in making knowledge accessible to all who seek it—an elemental requirement of a democratic society—they deserve the admiration the public has long given them. Yet, in places where “parent rights” groups have been particularly aggressive, librarians have been subject to such vile scorn that a growing number of them are leaving their careers, according to academic studies.

Parents, including those following the template of parent rights groups for objecting to books, have the right to voice their concerns to school and library authorities. But Wisconsin’s state government should have no role in supporting book-banning efforts with legislation.

Members of parent rights groups–Moms for Liberty and others with a similar agenda—represent a small minority of parents of school children, yet they, and conservative legislators who support them with their political fawning, want to make rules for every parent to follow.

Parent rights matter, but so do parent responsibilities, one of which is to guide their own children as they find their way through a world of information, whether that involves keeping tabs on the books they read or monitoring their access to the internet.

Libraries enable the right of readers to make their own choices on what books they or their children read, and they should be defended as an essential institution of this egalitarian society.