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This is an opinion column.
Don’t say this isn’t censorship. Don’t tell me it’s not book banning.
Don’t claim the criminalization of ideas is liberty.
(I don’t think that word means what you think it means.)
Please don’t say preventing others from reading things you disagree with is freedom. And in the name of all that is good and literary, don’t point a loaded gun at a librarian and call it a peace pipe.
What’s happening in Alabama, and across America, is absurd. Up is down. Wrong is right. Irony is reality, and it’s getting harder for people to see it.
The Alabama House of Representatives on Thursday passed a bill – in the bastardized name of liberty and safety for all – that would allow librarians to be charged with crimes if they fail, within a week, to remove books or movies or access to anything a random complainer quibbles about.
This panic-stricken bill, trundled out by Rep. Arnold Mooney, R-Indian Springs, on the back of an old law that was designed to rid the streets of adult bookstores and porn shops, tells people to notify their district attorney if they want something removed from the shelves of their public or school library.
It kowtows to Moms for Liberty – an ironic, Orwellian name for an organized political group formed for the purpose of censorship. It emboldens that group’s arguments that sex education is porn and recognizing LGBTQ people sexualizes children. It threatens librarians with arrest for stocking materials that are politically unpopular to some, but not all people and parents.
Mooney argued the party line, that “This is an effort to protect children…It’s a people bill to try to protect children.”
But what it really is is a bill to try to prevent children from seeing any ideas that one extreme and vocal segment of the population disagrees with.
Which is about as American as apple borscht.
Which should frighten just about anybody with ideas.
The Alabama Library Association said — in an understatement — that politicians are turning libraries into political battlefields.
“Public and school librarians could be penalized or even arrested by prosecutors eager to follow the demands of Alabama Republican Chair John Wahl, an Alabama Public Library Service Board member, who’s willing to jail librarians for having books he considers unacceptable,” the group said in a statement. “This bill is government overreach, robs parents of their rights, and would have a chilling effect on free speech by potentially incarcerating librarians because particular books are available, including even the Bible.”
It’s crazy that public libraries and librarians are being likened to public nuisances for maintaining our access to a range of ideas. They are the opposite.
It’s crazy that a library stocking sex education books is taboo. Particularly in a state where teen pregnancy is far above the national average, the rate of STDs is among the worst in the nation, and overall well-being for children is near the bottom. It’s nuts that a group of closed-minded people could control what others can see by calling it smut.
It’s especially absurd in a world where genuinely violent, offensive and raunchy things can be seen on any website, TV, social media or playground.
This bill, which will likely go to the Senate next week, is disingenuous, dangerous and dumb. It doesn’t protect children. That’s not even its real intent. Its intent is to demonize gay people and trans people, to wipe out any discussion of non-binary people in a way that recognizes them as, well, people.
Rep. Danny Garrett, a Republican from Jefferson County, said as much in defending the bill.
“We woke up one day and things changed that people didn’t understand were changing.”
So the choice is not to understand. It is to criminalize those ideas, starting with librarians.
This is not freedom. It is fear. And it is becoming clear that the only thing we really have to fear is the fearful.
John Archibald is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
