Librarians fear penalties, prison amid proposed laws
When an illustrated edition of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” was released in 2019, educators in Clayton, Missouri, needed little debate before deciding to keep copies in high school libraries. The book is widely regarded as a classic work of dystopian literature about the oppression of women, and a graphic novel would help it reach teens who struggle with words alone.
But after Missouri legislators passed a law in 2022 subjecting librarians to fines and possible imprisonment for allowing sexually explicit materials on bookshelves, the suburban St. Louis district reconsidered the new Atwood edition and withdrew it.
“There’s a depiction of a rape scene, a handmaid being forced into a sexual act,” says Tom Bober, Clayton’s library coordinator and president of the Missouri Association of School Librarians. “... We felt it was in violation of the law in Missouri.”
Across the country, book challenges and bans have soared to the highest levels in decades. Public and schoolbased
libraries have been inundated with complaints from community members and conservative organizations such as Moms for Liberty. Increasingly, lawmakers are considering new punishments — crippling lawsuits, hefty fines, and even imprisonment — for distributing books some regard as inappropriate.
The trend comes as officials seek to define terms such as “obscene” and “harmful.” Many of the conflicts involve materials featuring racial and/ or LGBTQ+ themes, such as Toni Morrison’s novel, “The Bluest Eye,” and Maia Kobabe’s memoir, “Gender Queer.” While no librarian or educator has been jailed, the threat alone has led to more self-censorship.
Already this year, lawmakers in more than 15 states have introduced bills to impose harsh penalties on libraries or librarians. Utah enacted legislation in March that empowers the state’s attorney general to enforce a new system of challenging and removing “sensitive” books from school settings.
“The laws are designed to limit or remove legal protections that libraries have had for decades,” says Deborah
Caldwell-stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
Since the early 1960s, institutions including schools, libraries and museums — as well as educators, librarians and others who distribute materials to children — have largely been exempt from lawsuits or potential criminal charges.
These protections began showing up as America grappled with standards surrounding obscenity, which was defined by the Supreme Court in 1973. Ruling 5-4 in Miller v. California, the justices said obscene materials are not automatically protected by the First Amendment, and offered three criteria that must be met for being labeled obscene: whether the work, taken as a whole, appeals to “prurienst interest,” whether “the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law,” and whether the work lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
Eventually, almost every state adopted protections for educators, librarians and museum officials, among others
who provide information to minors.
Arkansas and Indiana targeted educators and librarians with criminalization laws last year. Tennessee criminalized publishers that provide “obscene” materials to public schools.
Some Republicans are seeking penalties and restrictions that would apply nationwide. Referring to “pornography” in the foreword to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a possible second Donald Trump administration, the right-wing group’s president, Kevin Roberts, wrote that the “people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
A PEN America list shows 300 titles were removed from school libraries across 11 Missouri districts after lawmakers in 2022 banned “sexually explicit” material, punishable by up to a year in jail or a $2,000 fine.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri and library groups challenged the law last year, but it remains in effect pending a motion for the state to intervene.