Photo by Erin Nelson. Starnes Media
North Shelby Library
The North Shelby Library on Cahaba Valley Road. Photo by Erin Nelson.
A bill pre-filed by Rep. Arnold Mooney (R-Indian Springs) would put libraries in the same category as strip clubs, XXX theaters and adult bookstores under Alabama’s criminal code.
HB4, which Mooney prefiled on July 8, would put librarians side by side in the Code of Alabama’s obscenity laws with pornographic professionals, setting up an avenue to prosecute librarians for materials housed in their libraries.
Mooney and two other local legislators — Susan DuBose, R-Hoover, and Jim Carns, R-Vestavia Hills — have signed on as co-sponsors of the bill. The three make up a majority of the legislative group that now selects the board for the North Shelby and Mt Laurel libraries.
The new procedure for board selection came after a decision by the old board not to ban a display at the North Shelby Library that featured LGBTQ+-themed children’s books. Previously, the board was elected by a vote of the library district, though many members ran unopposed.
Craig Scott, the president of the Alabama Library Association, says libraries are easy targets for activists.
“Why have we been targeted?” Scott asked. “Do we have that sort of material in our kids department? Absolutely not.”
The proposed addition to the state’s obscenity laws includes public libraries and K-12 school libraries, but it does not include university libraries.
The bill also sets up a process where libraries would be forced to formally respond to any local resident who filed a complaint about materials held at the library and either move materials to an “age-restricted” area, ban materials or decide the materials do not violate the law. If the libraries respond that no further action will be taken, the resident who complained may take the copy of the original complaint and the library’s response to the police.
DuBose said libraries had previously been sheltered from the state’s obscenity laws under an education exclusion, but “book content was very different.”
“The fact is we have to be very careful in curating the selection of books,” she said. “Our librarians and our boards have to make careful decisions about what is housed in our libraries.”
That may mean “it’s time for a book to be removed,” DuBose said.
But, she said, she doesn’t want librarians to suffer the penalties. She imagines a library would be fined if they were found guilty under the new law.
“I don’t think that librarians should be sent to jail,” she said.
At the root of the bill, Scott believes, is a targeted effort by activists to remove any book that has LGBTQ+ themes from Alabama’s public libraries.
“The books they’re focused on are all of the LGBTQ stuff,” said Scott, who also acts as the library director in Gadsden. “The 30 books that have been challenged here in Gadsden, 90% are LGBTQ.”
Niki Smith, the author of “The Deep & Dark Blue,” which sat on the top shelf of the Pride Month display at the North Shelby Library that led to the Legislature’s changes to the library board, said efforts to keep LGBTQ+ literature hidden is part of a movement to “quietly and subtly” ban books.
“When diverse voices are silenced and oppressed, we all suffer,” Smith said. “Treating LGBTQ+ experiences as something 'obscene' that need to be censored is incredibly harmful to young readers who are just desperate to know they're not alone.”
