Hey, kid … wanna see a book?

Somebody gets elected to the state Legislature from a rural conservative area after promising to address culture-war complaints by conservative constituents. Then that legislator files a bill to keep his promise, so that he might get voted back to the Legislature.

Then more-informed and more-responsible persons tell him his bill is messed up and needs to be toned down to be workable law. He agrees to a lengthy amendment that scales his bill back to as much reasonableness as possible. It amounts in amended form to a heavy dollop of superfluity and next-to-nothingness except for one or two dangerous sentences that he insists on keeping.

He wants to be able to pass something just to say he did. His colleagues want to oblige him because they, too, have made culture-war declarations back home they want to appear to have addressed.

It’s all of a pattern common in this new-age wild-right Legislature, from a bill that starts out to limit the location of drag-queen shows but gets rewritten to make it a crime to reveal semi-nudeness, whatever qualifies as that, in the presence of children; and, now, to a bill that started out to criminalize librarians if parents got offended by something their kids got to see at the library, and that the sponsor ends up presenting to a legislative committee on the theme that it’s revised to the point that it doesn’t do much.

“I’m not trying to micromanage libraries,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan of Jonesboro, leading to audience laughter from librarians who came to the hearing looking beleaguered only to turn briefly amused.

Sen. Gary Stubblefield, the injudicious chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he would remove people who laughed again.

Burdened by a healthy sense of humor, I sat for a few minutes and then departed rather than risk the spectacle of getting thrown out if Sullivan spoke again and cracked me up with deadpan irony.

To be clear, Sullivan’s bill as amended down from atrocity still allows for the remote prospect that an Arkansas librarian in a public or school library could get charged with a felony if some kid managed to get hold of a library book that mom and dad thought was nasty.

Here’s what the bill does in pared form: If a parent wishes to complain about a book in the hands of a child originating in the local or school library, that parent must register the complaint with the head librarian, who must then appoint a review group of five people to consider the complaint and issue a judgment that the parent, if rejecting, can take to the school board, city council or county quorum court. Then, if the book is ordered pulled from the shelves by those final arbiters, yet then gets in the hands of a kid through the library, then the librarian could face a felony charge if the prosecutor chose to push it.

To allow for that, Sullivan had to provide in his bill that a longstanding exemption for librarians from obscenity laws would be repealed. But such an exemption for museums would not be repealed.

As Sullivan explained, nobody had complained to him about museums— and he is all about addressing what the folks back home have commanded him to address.

The possibility thus exists that a museum could display a naked statue and be legal but a library couldn’t offer a book of art with a picture of that statue on the cover without the prospect of landing that librarian in jail.

Meantime, Sullivan, who advocates local control in other contexts, says we need a unified centralized state process for dealing with supposed librarian pornographers.

Consistency is not a kook-right strong suit.

Through it all, the point is that there is plenty of law against obscene-material distribution now, and there are prosecutors and judges to deal with alleged violations. There simply is no need for new law.

Any librarian hell-bent on distributing genuinely obscene material to kids—before the kids go home and beam it up on the Internet—risks the same ultimate trouble with or without this bill.

There is inherent contradiction in parental hands that are wrung over library materials yet convey iPhones to children.

Conservatives used to decry activist government and the nanny state. Now they show us how it’s done.