Alabama lawmakers on Thursday advanced legislation that could see librarians prosecuted under the state’s obscenity law for providing “harmful” materials to minors, the latest in a wave of bills in Republican-led states targeting library content and decisions.
The Alabama House of Representatives voted 72-28 for the bill that now moves to the Alabama Senate. The legislation comes amid a soaring number of book challenges — often centered on LGBTQ content — and efforts in a number of states to ban drag queen story readings.
“This is an effort to protect children. It is not a Democrat bill. It’s not a Republican bill. It’s a people bill to try to protect children,” Republican Rep. Arnold Mooney, the bill’s sponsor, said during debate.
The Alabama bill removes the existing exemption for public libraries in the state’s obscenity law. It also expands the definition of prohibited sexual conduct to include any “sexual or gender oriented conduct” at K-12 public schools or public libraries that “exposes minors to persons who are dressed in sexually revealing, exaggerated, or provocative clothing or costumes, or are stripping, or engaged in lewd or lascivious dancing, presentations, or activities.”
Unfortunately, there’s little tiny towns on the other side of the border unless she wanted to have a 90 minute commute. Which is not 100% not an option considering that was about the length of her commute when we lived in L.A.
But we also moved away from L.A. in part because she was never seeing our baby due to her commute. Even when we were able to move closer to where she worked, it was still a 45 minute commute. Now it’s 15 minutes. On top of that, it’s basically her dream job and she let me work my dream job(s) in the entertainment industry for years in L.A., so I’d hate for her to have to give it up.
There are so many reasons why it’s worth not currently moving. And I say that despite hating this town and not thinking much of Indiana in general. But if she could get arrested just for doing her job? Then we won’t have much of a choice. Honestly, we aren’t entirely ruling out leaving the country because I have dual citizenship with the UK and we believe my brother and I also qualify for German citizenship due to typical German bureaucracy.
We’ll see what happens in the next year or so, I guess.
Most of that sucks. Not the part where she loves her job type stuff though. Once you start going down the IL/IN border things start getting farther apart beyond small communities. Also it is super easy to make changes if it is just 1 or 2ish people, but once you get into relatives with possibly additional needs and sometimes kids with established lives and friend groups that one doesn’t want to disrupt, making changes gets difficult.