Michael Ian Black: West Virginia Republicans Want to Throw Librarians in Jail
We’ve got to do something about these sexy, sexy libraries. Instead of public spaces that house books and other collections that are free of charge to borrow, today’s libraries are little more than recruiting stations for drag queens and aggrieved minorities trying to turn our children into godless monsters hellbent on transforming our once-great nation into Queer Valhalla.
Dewey Decimal would hang his head in shame. Something has to be done! Thank white Jesus that somebody is finally taking a stand.
Last week, the West Virginia House overwhelmingly passed Bill 4653, which would “remove bona fide schools, public libraries, and museums from the list of exemptions from criminal liability relating to distribution and display to a minor of obscene material.” In essence, any teacher, librarian, or museum curator is now potentially on the hook for $25,000 and up to five years in jail if convicted.
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To which I say, good. I can’t tell you the number of times my kids came from elementary school with old issues of Honcho magazine tucked into their backpacks.
“Where did you get this?” I would demand.
“The librarian made us take it!” they would say, tears streaming down their innocent cheeks. And there wasn’t a goddamned thing I could do about it, no matter how many times I paged through the magazine after the kids went to bed.
I kid, of course. These are problems that no parent has ever had. Think about it: If they were really handing out porn in public libraries, don’t you think libraries would be a lot more popular?
But West Virginia Republicans aren’t taking any chances. And other states are also leaping to protect the children from commies in rainbow attire. NBC News reports that “at least 13 states have introduced legislation that could disrupt libraries’ services and censor their materials.”
Wisconsin, for example, is currently considering a similar bill to West Virginia’s. Idaho has a bill on the table that would “prohibit certain materials from being promoted, given, or made available to a minor.” Which materials? Among other transgressions, the bill would prohibit from minors any book that contains sexual contact, defined as “any act of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse, or physical contact with a person’s clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks or, if such person be a female, the breast.”
I can’t help but notice that they’re including “buttocks” in this list. I’m sorry, but when they go after butt stuff, they’ve gone too far.
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If West Virginia’s law is ultimately passed by the Senate and followed to the letter, the only books left in the public libraries will be the Hardy Boys mysteries, and I’m not entirely comfortable with the way those Hardy boys spent so much time together.
Pretty much every work of literature worth a damn deals in some respect with affairs of the human heart and, by extension, human sexuality. Do we really want to cut off students from learning about all aspects of their own humanity? And why is it that the people who get most bent out of shape about this sort of thing so often end up being the ones guilty of offenses they are so quick to assign to their political opponents? (I’m including this partial list of “Republican Sexual Predators, Abusers, and Enablers” for no particular reason.)
Perhaps we should take a moment to acknowledge the 40th anniversary of the year 1984.
In 2023, a graphic novel version of George Orwell’s book about government censorship (which was named after the year 1984) was removed from library shelves in the Kirkwood district of St. Louis for violating a section of Missouri law which is essentially the same as the one West Virginia will likely soon impose. No word on whether books about irony were also banned.
It would be an obvious exaggeration to say we are living Orwell’s nightmare, but it’s increasingly looking like 1982 out there, maybe even 1983.
And when the dust settles from the upcoming presidential contest, perhaps we will find ourselves blown even further backwards in time. Perhaps 1884.
The conservatives at the center of the new book-banning craze view the situation differently, of course, choosing to frame their genitalia obsession as some sort of Bizarro World patriotic cause. But every now and again their weird, fundamentalist, ahistorical worldview comes to the fore.
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A 2022 press release from the Wisconsin Family Action with the absurd headline, “Disney Admits to Grooming Children,” laid out their strategy for demonizing the House of Mouse, but which is equally applicable to their current fearmongering of… no matter how many times I say it, it’s still seems odd—libraries: “If parents don’t take action, they are risking that their children will end up pledging allegiance to radical gender ideology and placing their faith in the secular whims of the day instead of in God.”
Never mind that the Pledge of Allegiance does not ask for allegiance to God. It asks for allegiance to the nation, a nation whose government deliberately divorced itself from religion because its founders understood that “the secular whims of the day” are a far better basis for legislation than the often contradictory, always subjective laws of religious texts.
But I wouldn’t expect them to know this because when an ideology depends on the ignorance of its adherents, it’s all too easy to overlook such meddlesome concepts as “truth” and “facts.” Fortunately, there’s a free solution at hand available to everybody.
It’s called a library.
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