A bill before the New Hampshire legislature, Senate Bill 523, is a frontal attack on school libraries in the state and the vendors that provide books to them. The bill is sponsored by State Senator Kevin Avard. It’s the kind of lunacy you’d expect in Kansas or Texas, not New Hampshire.
It would set up a bounty system for bringing complaints against material which is allegedly “harmful to minors.” Anyone claiming to be aggrieved under the bill’s terms would be able to sue for damages. A person bringing a successful suit would be guaranteed a minimum payout of $1,000. What Avard is trying to set up isn’t just a way to remove inappropriate books but a way to incentivize gratuitous challenges.
One of the criteria for being harmful to minors is that the material is “patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community with respect to what is suitable for minors.” People vary a lot in what they consider acceptable. Can any librarian know in advance whether a court will deem a book offensive?
“Serious literary, scientific, medical, artistic, or political value” constitutes an exception. Again, who’s going to decide a book’s literary and artistic merits?
The worst feature is that vendors would be required to set up a rating system for books if they want to do business with school libraries. Avard uses a sneaky trick here. The bill is full of definitions up front, but there’s no definition for two crucial terms, “sexually explicit” and “sexually relevant.” It would require vendors “to submit to the department of education an initial list of sexually explicit material and sexually relevant material in active use by a district or charter school and provide annual updates to that list.” A clinical description of the process of sperm meeting ovum is arguably sexually explicit. A lot of biology texts are explicit in their descriptions of sex. Vendors would be required to label them, casting a cloud of suspicion over them all.
And what in the world does “sexually relevant” mean? Biology texts, birds-and-bees texts, wedding guides, and romance novels are all sexually relevant. Does Avard want to slap warning labels on all of them?
See also the WMUR news article.
SB 523 is very dangerous stuff.