Now Georgia Wants Criminal Charges for Librarians for ‘Obscenity’

A week after legislators in the state of Missouri introduced a bill that would send school librarians to jail for lending out books deemed to contain “sexual material,” two lawmakers in Georgia are pushing similar legislation for their state. Georgia state reps Karen Mathiak and Josh Bonner, both Republicans, have introduced House Bill 1041, titled the “Out with School Obscenity Act.” Under the proposed statute, a current provision exempting K-12 school librarians from criminal penalties for giving “obscene” material to minors would be removed, according to a report by Georgia’s Citizen newspaper.  According to Bonner, the purpose of the bill would be to “confront the over-sexualization of kids,” according to the Citizen report. Under the new law, a parent committee would review materials in school libraries to decide what counts as “obscene.” Georgia law already provides criminal penalties for adults who distribute “obscene” material to minors, but school librarians were specifically exempted from those penalties. Under HB1041, that exemption would be lifted. The law applies not only to “obscenity” in books, but also in school instructional materials and online databases.  In 2018, a “parents” group in Colorado filed a lawsuit against the educational database company EBSCO, as well as against the Colorado Library Consortium, alleging that among the millions of resources in the database, obscene material was lurking, waiting to be discovered by schoolchildren. But just a few months later, the parents group dropped the lawsuit, but not before forcing the Library Consortium to spend $35,000 defending itself. The Georgia bill will provide parents full access to all digital resources available to school students, according to the group Protect Student Health Georgia, which supports the bill. “It will protect children from access to obscene books, pictures and videos while using school library media centers and school approved online database research sites and websites,” said Noelle Kahaian, the groups’s spokesperson. “Access to these materials sexualizes our kids and makes them targets for grooming in the sex trafficking industry.” Though the extent of criminal penalties that could be faced by Georgia school librarians remained unclear under the text of the bill, the proposed law in Missouri could hit librarians with a $500 fine, and up to a year in jail. Photo By Ken Lund / Wikimedia Commons