Sen. Max Burns presents his library bill to a Senate committee. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder
The Georgia Legislature is considering a new bill aimed at preventing children from accessing explicit materials in libraries, but opponents say it would chill free speech and open the state up to lawsuits.
Senate Bill 74, which passed out of committee Tuesday on a party line vote, would remove an exemption for librarians in the section of state code dealing with distributing sexually explicit materials to minors.
The bill’s sponsor, Sylvania Republican Sen. Max Burns, said the law should have always applied to librarians.
“For unknown reasons to me, librarians were exempted from following Georgia law,” he said. “I’d like to point out teachers were not exempted. Coaches were not exempted. Pastors were not exempted.”
“So you have to ask a question, a simple question, why do we choose to exempt librarians? I require a convenience store owner to make the decision whether or not material that they provide is potentially harmful to minors. Convenience stores. Librarians are professionals.”
The bill would apply to librarians, including at school libraries, who “knowingly” violate the law. It would exempt library workers who can demonstrate that they “made a good faith attempt” to block harmful materials from minors.
Kerry Pritchard, with the Georgia Department of Education’s legislative affairs team, said enforcing the bill could be a challenge.
“With libraries, you could have 2,500 books that are everywhere, but there’s one person to be able to monitor everything,” she said. “It might be hard to know exactly what books are in the library for the simple fact that there’s, A, so many of them, and there might be books that are 30 years old that no one has put into a computer system to know one way or the other if it’s on the shelves.”
Sen. Elena Parent, an Atlanta Democrat, said she’s concerned the bill does not specify what would be considered explicit.
“Outside of some pretty major lines, a lot of it is subjective. If you take the young adult category, I bet there’s plenty in the young adult category of Barnes and Noble that many people in the legislature would at least say that they were totally opposed to and found harmful to minors, to be honest with you,” she said. “So that’s where I’m just struggling with, it didn’t sound like we have a bright line standard in the law.”
Priscilla Bence of Columbia County came to the Capitol to testify about the bill, but committee members voted on it without hearing public comment, citing time constraints.
Bence said she would have testified about sexual materials she found and read in her local libraries.
“There are approximately 150 young adult books in the teen rooms in most of our city and county libraries, and they encourage early sex, because the libraries use the term young adult and teen interchangeably,” she said. “12-year-olds are reading porn and obscenity in these teen rooms. The most common books in the genre are the LGBTQ+ relationships that are easier to locate and challenge, but if I ever find one about heterosexual sex at young ages, I would challenge that book.”
When legislators have attempted to address this issue in the past, advocates have expressed fears that legislation would disproportionately target books by LGBTQ authors and authors of color.
Christoper Bruce, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, said if he had the opportunity, he would have testified that the bill is similar to a piece of legislation struck down in Arkansas.
“The court struck down the key provisions of this law, underscoring that deputizing librarians as agents of censorship under the threat of jail time could create a chilling effect on the availability of literature and libraries,” Bruce said. “SB 74 creates the same legal vulnerabilities and will likely face similar constitutional challenges if it passes.”
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