Senate Bill 7: Library Censorship
Ladies and gentlemen, and all of us who are neither and/or both, welcome welcome welcome to Sophie’s Legislative Review, I’m your host Sophie and in this exciting episode we’re reviewing Louisiana Senate Bill 7 as well as the committee hearing of the same which took place on April 27, 2023.
This is a version of the library censorship laws that we’ve seen pop up in other states. There’s really nothing particularly interesting, in my opinion, about this bill. It’s the same fear-mongering and equivocation that we every few decades, whenever non-majority folks start to get books published.
Before we jump in, though, our usual content warning: The recordings we’ll hear today contain transphobia, queerphobia and the usual amount of ignorance and infuriating untruths. Please take care of yourselves, friends.
[Theme Music]
Oh! You might notice our new theme music. Our in-house musician, Andrew Kuo, suggested we might want something a little angrier, given the content of our podcast and donated this song. Thank you, Andrew!
Now, the bill. Here’s the sponsor, Senator Cloud, explaining it:
I have Senate Bill seven before all of you. I think knowing all of you, we can agree that parents have the fundamental right to decide the upbringing and education of their children. Even Netflix, apple, your local movie theaters and video game producers respect this, right?
These platforms have acknowledged a parent's right to guide and direct the reading, listening and viewing choices of their own minor children by establishing parental preferences and controls within those platforms. Those controls empower parents to protect their children from accessing what they feel is inappropriate content for the age of their children.
Unfortunately, many libraries lack adequate policies addressing the access of minors to sexually explicit material. Parents and grandparents from across Louisiana have expressed that they want the public libraries that they fund to simply have more modern controls in place to select and limit the level of access their children have to sexually explicit material that they feel is inappropriate and even harmful for their children.
With respect to that fundamental right and at the request of multitudes of moms, dads, grandmothers, and grandfathers, I have before you a piece of legislation that simply requires libraries to adopt and implement policy language to tailor the access of minors library cards to sexually explicit materials to prohibit sexually explicit materials.
Equating libraries to online content providers is an interesting approach, no doubt meant to make all this sound reasonable. I think there’s a lot to be said about that, but I’ll leave it aside for now to point out that almost all libraries do in fact have policies about which books can be checked out by which patrons, and we’ll circle back to that in just a second.
This bill and this session have two main themes. The first is control. Who gets to control who says what, and who’s allowed to hear it. The second theme is the bible’s precarious situation when we start talking about what children should and shouldn’t know.
Let’s start with the first theme, that of power. We’re not long into Senator Cloud’s presentation before a retired lawmaker starts talking about amendments. This was confusing to me, personally, as it seemed like the committee was allowing some elderly white dude to rewrite her bill in real time, right in front of her.
Senator Cloud must have thought the same. This is her question to the committee chair Cleo Fields, who you’ll hear basically tell her to shut up.
Mr Chair, May I just ask, I've not been through this before, but a, as much as I appreciate the former senator, is it cus is it customary within this body for someone to come in and offer up amendments and explain their amendments and basically rewrite my bill? I'm, I'm, yes ma'am, it is. I'm offering up the amendment and, and the gentleman is explaining them for me.
Ah, the theme of power: Who gets to talk in the committee room, who gets to come out of retirement and rewrite someone else’s bill that itself is trying to determine who gets to read what. Talk about high drama in the Senate.
It appears that much of what the retired lawmaker, we can go ahead and refer to him as Mr. Amendments, I think, is dealing with the second theme, the precarious position of the Bible in this conversation. Here’s his reasoning on this front:
Right now, if a work depicts or describes any of the acts listed on page two, in section three, paragraphs A through E, it has to be labeled sexually explicit. We have run through this with our librarians and with others if this definition stands, dictionaries, encyclopedias, biology textbooks, art history books, uh, Greek and Roman mythology, Shakespeare.
And last but not least, the Bible will be labeled sexually explicit if the current definition stands.
So we have proposed an amendment. It would define sexually explicit material means textual, visual or audio material produced in any medium that an average person applying contemporary community standards for the age-based library collection in which the work is located included
if that person would find that the work appeals to the prurient interest
I love this part. He goes on to describe some of the passages of the Bible that could potentially lead us to think this book shouldn’t be in the library.
Now, you don't have to be a lawyer to read the Bible and know a I refer you to Onan is in genesises.
You can see, and there are many, many ultimate sexual acts depicted and described in the Bible, i e, David, and Bathsheba.
I’m so sad he stops there. This could have gone on for a while. After all, there is a lot in the bible that matches exactly the content that they want to restrict. But for some reason, they don’t quite get to the point of just admitting that maybe the Bible is to sexual.
And that gets us back to the role of community standards. You see, as a community, they already love the Bible (or whatever portions they choose to focus on), so obviously the Bible is fine. The point of community standards is to allow us to restrict new things, that we don’t yet love. Things that are scary to us, that make us uncomfortable.
So, we need to focus on community standards because otherwise our efforts to get rid of sexually explicit material will make us remove the bible. And we don't’ want to remove the bible, so we’ll just say that it’s a standard of our community. Seems pretty tidy to me.
Now back the first theme – that of who has the power to be heard. As it turns out in this committee hearing, not too many people! Senator cloud got sidelined by Mr. Amendments, and only proponents of the bill got to testify.
Speaking of proponents of the bill, I feel like we need to hear from this person who identified as bing from Jefferson Parish.
I wanna tell you about one of the books that are in, it's in the kindergarten section. Can you imagine a five, six year old seeing this book?
And it says, gender queer. And there's, and when you pick it, you see a, a boy, and there's a reflection and it's very confusing
So she felt moved to come today to claim that the book Gender Queer is in the kindergarten section of the Jefferson Parish Library. Strangely, all one needs to do is search for Gender Queer in the Jefferson Parish Public Library catalog to see that it’s shelved with the Adult nonfiction.
This is easy to find. Any internet-enabled device allows you to fact check that person’s claim. Presumably someone on the opposition would have pointed that out. However, they didn’t get a chance to speak at all.
Senator White called for a vote before the opposition was heard, and shockingly no one seemed to object.
I think we've had quite a bit of testimony. I think everybody at this committee has children understand what lewd andous acts are. I called the subject on the entire matter on Senate Bill seven called the Question Senator. Wow. Senator White calls for the previous question on the entire subject matter.
Is there any objection?
It’s highly unusual for a committee not to allow opposition testimony, but plays exactly into the power plays that we’ve come to expect from the Louisiana legislature at this point.
Or, as Committee Chair Cleo fields says, “Shut up, that’s the way the process works.”
I want to apologize for those who were in opposition who did not get an opportunity to be heard. Um, uh, this is the process and I want to thank you all for coming.
I guess they were tired of working for the day? Hard to say, they didn’t let anyone ask.
And now my review of the bill: Two big thumbs down. It would have been a lot of fun if they maintained some internal constancy and just said, fuck it I guess we need to ban the bible, but they didn’t. What a shame.
As for the committee meeting for the bill? Another two thumbs down. I’m never sure if opposition testimony makes a big difference, but it’s an important part of a functioning democratic institution. Do better, Louisiana Senate.
And Now! It’s time for Bingo!
If you have the following on your card, please give yourself a hand (Onan is in genesises
A bill is rewritten in real time in front of the bill sponsor
Onanism
Confusion over the Kindergarten section and the Adult Nonfiction Section
Being told that “This is the Process” while being denied your right to testify
Twisting yourself into a legal pretzel so as not to ban the bible
Congratulations to the winners of this exciting episode of Sophie’s Legislative Review and Authoritarian Bingo extravaganza
[applause]
This is a production of the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project. Views expressed here are only my own, and maybe also my dog’s. Thanks to Andrew Kuo for the original music.
Be safe out there, everyone. And tell the ones you love that you love them.