Censorship's Next Target: Little Free Libraries

Pro-censorship forces have had a ton of success over the past few years. Through the frivolous allegations of criminal charges they have scared school districts into removing various books for no reason other than a minority doesn’t like the books. This has also led to a chilling effect as school librarians, in particular, are scared to even order some types of books - especially anything that depicts queer people living their lives - because of fear of these censors and their harassment. Now Utah’s censorship group has a new target: little free libraries.

Washington County was an early adopter of censorship here in Utah beginning with two books and then expanding as censorship forces organized their campaign. Outside of schools, the major city in the county recently de facto fired its city manager, paying him a decent sum to leave, because he refused to illegally revoke a license for a drag event, a move that would have opened the city to litigation it would lose easily. As with many other locations, the actual youths who censors claim to be protecting are resisting. They are organizing banned book discussions as well as donations to little free libraries. If you’ve never seen one, these little libraries are fun community projects where a person, group, or even business puts out books for anyone to take and/or donate to as they desire. On every visit to Utah’s premier (and I believe only) queer bookstore, Under the Umbrella, I always purchase two books, usually young adult fiction, for the bookstore’s little free library precisely because I want kids who maybe can’t afford the books to have a chance to find them. As censorship folks hate when minors get into activism, they have responded with horror. Including threats of prosecution.

Here we have the person who I believe is still “curriculum director” of Utah Parent’s United (UPU), our local book banners and overall bigots, threatening folks with prosecution. This is a frivolous statement. She is correct that obscenity law would apply to the little free library but she is lying that any of these books are obscene. It is not a debatable point. Book banners love to throw around the term “pornography” but none of these books are pornography, which in Utah is the legal term attached to unprotected obscenity. I won’t reiterate myself too much, as I’ve covered this so many times on here, see here. A foundational requirement of obscenity law is that the work be considered as a whole. UPU and other censorship groups do not do this. Instead, they just pull excerpts from works out of context and claim that the whole book is obscene and illegal. As the highest court of New York held 100 years ago, “No work may be judged from a selection of such paragraphs alone” because doing so would risk criminalizing “Aristophanes or Chaucer or Boccaccio or even from the Bible.” Until one can make a plausible argument that the work as a whole is obscene - and doing so would require that UPU and its censorship allies read the books, which they refuse to do - the claim that books are obscene is frivolous and just a form of harassment. I know they’ve been informed of this because Stephens complains from time to time that no one took her criminal complaint seriously.

At times I feel like I’m shouting into the wind. None of what I’ve written here is controversial or even contested by anyone familiar with the law. But the point is ignored by censors and I’ll never reach them. So why do I do it? Because hopefully the targets of their harassment will see this and push back. Sadly, education in so many places is slumping under the forces of censorship. Nowhere is this more evident than in Florida where two school districts ordered teachers to remove all books under threat of prosecution under obscenity laws, none of which would apply to the books, or Governor DeSantis’s attempt to censor teaching about LGTBQ people, race, and/or inequality. The books will be “screened” apparently by volunteers drawn from these censorship groups. In making frivolous claims about obscenity and in enacting vague laws that apply to nothing and thus can be threatened to everything, the goal of pro-censorship forces is precisely to create this atmosphere of fear. And I am happy to do what I can to push back against this harassment and support the freedom to read.