Alabama lawmakers on Thursday advanced legislation that could see librarians prosecuted under the state’s obscenity law for providing “harmful” materials to minors, the latest in a wave of bills in Republican-led states targeting library content and decisions.
The Alabama House of Representatives voted 72-28 for the bill that now moves to the Alabama Senate. The legislation comes amid a soaring number of book challenges — often centered on LGBTQ content — and efforts in a number of states to ban drag queen story readings.
“This is an effort to protect children. It is not a Democrat bill. It’s not a Republican bill. It’s a people bill to try to protect children,” Republican Rep. Arnold Mooney, the bill’s sponsor, said during debate.
The Alabama bill removes the existing exemption for public libraries in the state’s obscenity law. It also expands the definition of prohibited sexual conduct to include any “sexual or gender oriented conduct” at K-12 public schools or public libraries that “exposes minors to persons who are dressed in sexually revealing, exaggerated, or provocative clothing or costumes, or are stripping, or engaged in lewd or lascivious dancing, presentations, or activities.”
Thank you. Although we’re both at the very tail end of Gen X, so we didn’t eat avocado toast for breakfast. Maybe that’s why we have a house (in an undesirable place to live that we bought in 2017 when mortgages were reasonable).
I’m a millennial that doesn’t like avocado at all, so, speaking of disgraces!
We managed to get a house, but there are also 3 of us with no kids, I can’t imagine managing with two people in todays economy. We got in just before the rates skyrocketed in 2021, the house price is basically what the inflation calculators say the original owners bought it for decades ago, so, there’s that at least, that we only paid the equivalent of the original list price for a 5-6 decades old house with decades of shoddy repairs such as every single plug with a ground having the ground pin tied to the neutral!
It’s a real rough time out there right now though with ownership out of the realm of possibility for so many :-\