ST. LOUIS — School librarians across Missouri are pulling books from shelves as they face the potential for criminal charges under a new state law banning “explicit sexual material.”
The law goes into effect Aug. 28 and applies to both public and private schools. It was part of a state bill addressing various sexual assault and other crimes and creating a “sexual assault survivors bill of rights.”
The law defines explicit sexual material as any visual depiction of sex acts or genitalia, with exceptions for artistic or scientific significance.
“It applies to any kind of images, which could include images in books or magazines in a library. It could apply to images on internet sites to which students are directed. It doesn’t apply to the written word,” said attorney Jim Layton of Tueth Keeney, a St. Louis area law firm that represents local school districts.
Violations of the law by school employees who provide such materials to students are considered a class A misdemeanor, which carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a fine of $2,000.
Earlier this week, the Missouri Association of School Librarians said it was aware that some schools were “preemptively removing books” but advised its members not to do so.
The new law makes an exception for “works of art, when taken as a whole, that have serious artistic significance, or works of anthropological significance, or materials used in science courses, including but not limited to materials used in biology, anatomy, physiology, and sexual education classes.”
“School library collections contain both works of art and informational texts, and school library books, whether fiction or non-fiction, meet both of those requirements,” reads the association’s recommendation, which was published online Tuesday.
“We understand the immense impact of facing a challenge and will support our librarians in solidarity to preserve intellectual freedom,” the association added.
When they were debating bills related to education earlier this year, some Republican state lawmakers said they wanted to address concerns that students were being indoctrinated against their parents’ wishes. Rep. Dottie Bailey, a Republican, claimed at the time that school districts were “grooming their children to be sex addicts” by allowing them to read certain books.
The conservative activist group St. Charles County Parents Association recently posted book ratings on its website and links to file police reports “to arm parents with as much knowledge as possible to combat the perversion agenda that is being forced on our children.”
The group did not respond to a request for comment through its website, which cites the Wentzville School District as having the highest number of objectionable library books in the county.
A Wentzville School District administrator sent an email Monday to librarians, saying, “Starting now we need you to review your libraries for materials matching the language in this state statute. If you come across a text that needs to be removed ... pull the book from the shelf.”
A spokeswoman for the school district declined to comment, citing pending litigation. Two students represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri sued Wentzville in federal court in February for banning library books including Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” which the school board then returned to shelves.
Regarding the new Missouri law, Tom Bastian, a spokesman for the ACLU of Missouri, said it was “an attempt to silence viewpoints and stories from authors of marginalized communities.”
He said school districts shouldn’t pull books because they “abide by nationally well-established selection criteria for choosing appropriate materials for their libraries.” He also argued that the law “defines ‘explicit sexual material’ narrowly and does not criminalize materials that are currently in school libraries.”
Joe Kohlburn, head of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Missouri Library Association, called the new state law “terrible” and a move to “criminalize librarians.”
“It’s part of an unfortunate trend in our country to terrorize people who work in public service professions and to scapegoat them and make them pawns in the culture wars,” he said.
The increased scrutiny aimed at school library books in Missouri is part of a national trend. A district attorney in Tennessee went viral this week for a video in which she said a question about prosecuting librarians is a “tough one.” Lawmakers in Idaho this spring cut funding to the state’s public library system, citing obscenity. Nationwide, nearly 1,600 books were pulled from libraries or classrooms in the last school year, according to the nonprofit PEN America, compared with about 300 challenges or bans in previous years.
Professional library associations have a long-held position: Parents can choose not to let their child read a book, but they shouldn’t control other parents’ decisions on family reading.
Kohlburn of the Missouri Library Association also believes that the “works of art” reference in the new law could apply to many challenged books, which predominantly feature Black or LGBTQ characters.
“They forget that there are progressive parents, queer people in the community and others,” Kohlburn said. “Many of these people are also taxpayers who want their kids to access a wide variety of materials.”
