“Gotta figure out a way to keep the young ones moral after school,” the professor told the citizens of River City, Iowa.
Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft thinks he has a way to do that. He proposes taking away state funding for local libraries that don’t adopt written policies that allow any parent or guardian of a minor “to determine what materials and access will be available to a minor,” particularly any materials that might appeal to that minor’s prurient interests.
The ultimate moral policeman would be the Secretary of State, whoever it is now and whoever it might be in the future.
Librarians throughout the state are not reacting kindly to his idea. And local library boards, who are better cross-sections of community standards than one person at the state capital, by and large resent his meddling.
If you want to read the proposed rule, go to: https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages/AdRules/main/images/15_CSR_30_200_015.pdf
We are now within a thirty-day public comment period before the legislature’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules decides whether this overreach should become state policy.
One local library trustee who is known for wordiness minces no words in his response:
I am a trustee of a local library board, a position I have held off and on for more than twenty years. I was a delegate to the most recent White House Conference on Libraries and Information. I am a published author of five books with a sixth book under consideration by publishers.
I am a reader.
I believe in the First Amendment.
I do not believe in censorship.
I do not believe in government overreach.
I am not a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, but I do carry a valid library card.
The proposed rule on “Library Certification Requirements for the Protection of Minors” is a terrible rule and should be rejected by the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules.
This rule potentially gives the Secretary of State, whoever it might be or whoever it might become, the power to determine whether a library shall receive state funds based on his interpretation of what, as the rule states, “appeals to the prurient interest of any minor.”
The Secretary has issued a statement saying, “When state dollars are involved, we want to bring back local control and parental involvement in determining what children are exposed to. Foremost, we want to protect our children.”
The intimation in this statement that local control of libraries has been lost is irresponsible. Public libraries are governed by boards made up of local citizens. There has been no loss of local control. “Parental involvement in determining what children are exposed to” likewise seems to suggest parents have been restricted in considering whether a book that might be proper for someone else’s child to read is improper for their own child to have.
He also has said, “We want to make sure libraries have the resources and materials they need for their constituents, but we also want our children to be ‘children’ a little longer than a pervasive culture may often dictate.”
I am afraid that the statement only invites chaos. If libraries are to serve “their constituents,” they must have a wide range of materials available to a broad range of individuals at various levels of maturity. To expect librarians to determine the level of maturity of every nine-year old who walks into their buildings is unrealistic.
When I first heard about this rule, my first question was, “Who makes the ultimate decision?” It appears the answer is the Secretary of State. To place one person in a position of second-guessing professional community librarians is dangerous.
The proposed rule does not define this critical phrase which puts the Secretary of State, as the supervisor of the patronage position of State Librarian, in the position of making subjective judgments about the prurience of any single publication that is objectionable to “any material in any form not approved by the minor’s parent or guardian.”
“Prurience” is not defined nor is “age appropriate,” three words that open the door to onerous penalties based on an interpretation of one parent and/or one state official. And stoking fear of some kind of vague “pervasive culture” that the statement suggests has invaded our public libraries and motivates the professionals who manage them is completely uncalled for.
The rule creates the potential for the kind of decision referred to by Justice Potter Stewart who discussed the threshold test for defining obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio in 1964:
“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…”
By working backward from the parent to the Secretary of State, this rule indicates that a library could lose state funding if one parent of one child disagrees with a library’s policy on collection acquisitions by finding one book that the parent feels appeals to the child’s “prurient interest” and files the objection with the State Librarian and the librarian’s supervisor, the Secretary of State.
I do not believe our libraries and our librarians are the “dance at the arm’ry” referred to by Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man:
“Libertine men and scarlet women, and ragtime, shameless musicThat’ll grab your son, your daughter with the arms of a jungle, animal instinctMass-stariaFriends, the idle brain is the devil’s playground.”
Libraries are not devil’s playgrounds. Librarians are not “libertine” or “scarlet” but are instead highly professional defenders of the right to read, the right to know, the right to think. I believe they carefully evaluate additions to the collections, but they recognize that children as well as adults mature differently and determining “age appropriateness” is one of their most difficult tasks.
But if my children were still young readers, I should be the one to decide what they bring home. It is not my place to decide what should be available to another child of the same age but a higher maturity.
We refer to these institutions as free public libraries. I believe the word “free” means more than an institution that does not charge a membership fee that limits access to intellectual exploration and growth.
This is a bad rule that places one person in a position of denying funding to one of the most important institutions in any community because he or she agrees with one parent who finds one book objectionable.
Moral judgments are personal. The power to force others to bend to the moral judgment of any single political officer by cutting off funding to a library should never be allowed.
This rule is anti-freedom at several levels and has no business being part of state government. While I am concerned with our children remaining children, I am more concerned with what happens with a politician being a politician and what it can mean to the liberties of us all.
I urge the committee to reject this proposal.
Bob Priddy
Jefferson City
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He has got to be John’s boy. I attended a dinner at the mansion hosted by the Gov-at-the-time and happened to be seated next to the then Attorney Genedral Ashcroft. John made a gradd show of picking up his wine glass and moving it to the middle of the table so thaat the waiter would not fill it swas demon red or white. Geez! Why not just say “No thank you?”