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A highlight of Bill Maher’s weekly HBO program Real Time With Bill Maher is his “New Rule” segment, in which the noted liberal comedian and commentator opines sharply on some contemporary political issue. While reliably critical of the political right and former President Donald Trump in particular, in recent years he has become increasingly unsparing of the left as well, calling out wokeness for its Maoist intolerance and illiberalism, corporations for unnecessarily adopting leftist positions for profit, and our culture’s obsession with “presentism”—seeking to either condemn or recast the past in terms of present-day woke morality. Almost alone among liberal commentators, he has also been especially critical of gender identity ideology: in a 2023 segment entitled “Along for the Pride” he characterized the medicalization of gender-confused minors as a “blow being struck in the culture wars using children as cannon fodder.”
For his April 19th, 2024 segment “Quiet on Set,” Maher called out the sexualization of children, first by highlighting the deplorable treatment of young actors and actresses by predatory staff at Nickelodeon and Disney, before shifting to territory familiar to librarians: drag queen story times, the recent flood of children’s books dealing with sexuality and gender ideology, and educators encouraging young children to contemplate their own gender identity. He said,
Wokeness is not an extension of liberalism anymore, it’s more often taking something so far that it becomes the opposite. Teaching kids not to hate or judge those who are different—great! Proud we got there, all for that. But at a certain point inclusion becomes promotion. And contrary to current progressive dogma, children aren’t miniature adults wise beyond their years, they’re morons! They’re gullible morons who will believe anything and just want to please grownups. And they don’t have any frame of reference so they normalize whatever’s happening. That’s why endlessly talking about gender to 6-year olds isn’t just inappropriate, it’s what the law would call entrapment, which means enticing people into doing something they wouldn’t ordinarily do…and if you think if some of that isn’t going on with gender in schools, you’re not watching enough [teachers’] Tik Tok videos.
Maher’s arguments demonstrate that concern about the psychological, cognitive and emotional impacts of early exposure to overtly sexual content and gender identity ideology is not just some delirium of the far right, but exists across the political spectrum, including among some liberals.
Early exposure to sexual content has also been the subject of interdisciplinary scholarly investigation in the field of child development: In their 2023 systematic review article “Exposure to Sexual Content and Problematic Sexual Behaviors in Children and Adolescents” in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect, authors Mori et al. found significant
empirical support of the association between exposure to sexually explicit content and PSB [problematic sexual behaviors] among children and adolescents. Specifically, it indicates that exposure to sexual content was associated with increased likelihood of engaging in PSB (p. 12).
The authors define problematic sexual behaviors as
involv[ing] behaviors indicating sexual pre-occupation (e.g., asking persistent, repeated questions about sexuality), or sexual behaviors involving much younger children [as well as] use of aggression or coercion, sexual harassment or touching oneself in public (p. 2).
The authors stress that such content is now much more likely to be online than in print, but point to a paucity of existing research concerning younger children, and admit that the mechanism linking content exposure to PSB is unknown. Still, they nonetheless advise,
[a]n initial and universal approach to mitigating sexual content exposure as a risk factor for PSB is to prevent children’s exposure to sexual content, particularly at younger ages (p. 10).
A proper literature review into this area is well beyond the scope of this essay, but the fact that a very recent systematic review of the empirical scholarly literature would reveal negative developmental outcomes in the form of problematic sexual behaviors as a result of childhood exposure to non-violent sexual materials and recommend universal caution about exposing young children to such content should, I believe, concern us as librarians.
The issue has certainly caught the attention of policymakers.
Over the past year, many state governments, state libraries, library commissions, library associations, counties, and individual libraries have broken ties with the American Library Association, including those in Montana, Texas, Missouri, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Wyoming, with other states such as Alabama, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota being urged to contemplate similar action. In what is perhaps the harshest such measure, the Louisiana State Legislature in March of this year tabled House Bill 777, which would prohibit the use of public funds to pay for—or reimburse public employees—for ALA memberships or attending its events, with violators facing up to two years in prison, potentially with “hard labor.”
Such a schism between the national and state library associations is not unprecedented: during the civil rights era, the state library associations of both Louisiana and Mississippi withdrew from ALA because Jim Crow laws meant they were unable to meet its requirements for racial integration (see Hunter). In the current crisis, however, the divisions are many, and those cited by the authorities in these states include their negative responses to ALA President Emily Drabinski’s (now deleted) tweet in which she celebrated her election as a “Marxist lesbian who believes [in] collective power,” as well as to Deborah Caldwell-Stone (Director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom) seeking to both “reframe” controversies over sexually frank children’s books as a matter of promoting “diversity,” and advising libraries on how they could to use “loopholes to block” Christian book publisher BRAVE Books from holding events in meeting rooms.
Many red states are also proposing a suite of laws—some of them quite draconian—targeting libraries and library workers. West Virginia passed a bill that would open the door to charging library workers who “knowingly and intentionally display[] obscene matter to a minor” with a felony, for which they could face a fine of “up to $25,000 and…five years in prison if convicted”). Both blue and red states are engaging in a battle of competing legislation. According to the Washington Post,
a raft of measures [are] advancing nationwide that seek to do things like prohibit book bans or forbid the harassment of school and public librarians…Legislators in 22 mostly blue states have proposed 57 such bills so far this year, and two have become law…But the library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly red states that aim to restrict which books libraries can offer and threaten librarians with prison or thousands in fines for handing out “obscene” or “harmful” titles. At least 27 states are considering 100 such bills this year, three of which have become law, The Post found. That adds to nearly a dozen similar measures enacted over the last three years across 10 states. Lawmakers proposing restrictive bills contend they are necessary because school and public libraries contain graphic sexual material that should not be available to children.
Accusations of age-inappropriate content in children’s collections in public and school libraries most often center on such examples as Lawn Boy which features scenes of oral sex between two 10-year old boys; the graphic description of anal sex in All Boys Aren’t Blue; the memoir Gender Queer, which contains a comic-art depiction of an act of fellatio involving a strap-on dildo; It’s Perfectly Normal with its illustrations of sexual intercourse between straight, gay and lesbian couples; an explicitly-illustrated guide to masturbation—complete with close-up drawings—(including how to finger one’s own anus) in Let’s Talk About It, as well as advice for teens on sexting and browsing the Internet for porn. Most of these works either cross the boundary from traditional sex education to become sex instruction, or include language and images so graphic they cannot be shared in public venues—a fact to which many videos available online can attest, in which parents attempt to read passages from these (and other) books into the record at school board and city council meetings, only to be shut down by the chairs for being inappropriate; to which parents will often reply, “if it’s inappropriate for [this meeting] how can it be appropriate for children?” Objections have also been raised against non-explicit content that presents as fact the tenets of gender identity ideology—i.e., the supposed social construction of biological sex and the ability to change one’s gender at will—in such titles as It Feels Good to Be Yourself, a picture book aimed at pre-schoolers.
I should stress that questioning the age-appropriateness of a book is not the same as rendering judgement as to its merit. For example, Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel autobiography Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic—which has faced frequent challenges owing to a brief but frank depiction of lesbian sex—has been rightly praised as an important, literate and emotionally powerful work of graphic nonfiction. As such, it’s important to bear in mind that, regardless of the quality of the books cited above—the novels as works of literature for YA and adults, and the value of some of the information included in the non-fiction titles for older teens—what’s at issue for many observers is that certain content and images contained within them are simply not suitable for pre-teen readers and especially not for very young children.
Unfortunately, the debate over their age-appropriateness has been the focus of increasingly bitter public protests, some of which have crossed into deplorable examples of personal harassment, threats or abuse directed against library workers. The ALA has framed the actions of parents and organizations expressing concern about sexually explicit content as “coordinated, national efforts to silence marginalized or historically underrepresented voices.” PEN America, in their April 2024 report, Banned in the USA: Narrating the Crisis, condemn these “extreme state laws, [and the] hateful rhetoric” accompanying what they describe as “an extraordinary number of bans”—mostly of “books exploring LGBTQ+ identities and gender identity; books about race and racism and featuring characters of color; and books about sexual violence.”
The pitch of the rhetoric accompanying this controversy is undeniably heated: on the one hand, librarians are being accused of distributing pornography, and on the other parent’s rights groups are being labelled as homophobic, transphobic, far-right bigots. Untangling all this passion and anger is going to require dedicated professional attention on our part.
Could we perhaps start with our own professional rhetoric? Is it really defensible and sustainable to simultaneously assert that adult readers must be protected from books that might cause them harm, but that any such consideration regarding children must be condemned as “hate”? How do we square this circle? At the heart of this debate is our profession’s conception of children: are they an inherently vulnerable population requiring particular care and protection—or, as Bill Maher puts it, “miniature adults”?
Adopted by the ALA Council on June 19, 1939, the Library Bill of Rights (LBOR) would be further amended six times between 1944 and 2019. The Bill itself is brief—only seven short paragraphs that would fill a single printed page. The relevant passage for our purposes is clause V, and even then, it lists age as but one consideration among four:
A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views.
The inclusion of “age” as inadmissible grounds for denial of information would be reaffirmed by the Association on January 23rd, 1996. While the LBOR text declares that these statements are “unambiguous,” it directs the reader to supplementary “interpretive” documents further contextualizing each clause. In “Access to Library Resources and Services for Minors: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights,”1 the Association further affirms,
The American Library Association opposes all attempts to restrict access to library services, materials, and facilities based on the age of library users….Equitable access to all library resources and services should not be abridged based on chronological age, apparent maturity, educational level, literacy skills, legal status, or through restrictive scheduling and use policies…Children and young adults unquestionably possess First Amendment rights, including the right to receive information through the library in print, sound, images, data, social media, online applications, games, technologies, programming, and other formats. Constitutionally protected speech cannot be suppressed solely to protect children or young adults from ideas or images a legislative body believes to be unsuitable for them.
Note the Association’s repeated references to the Constitution of the United States as its authority in terms of the First Amendment rights not only of children in the library, but those of others whom children might hear or read; it makes no distinction between the First Amendment rights of children and adults. However, this is not legally the case: according to the online encyclopedia aggregator Encyclopedia.com,
Because many conceptions of the first amendment's protection of speech and press are premised on a model of human rationality and human choice and because traditional views about children take them to be incapable of having the rationality and exercising the capacity of choice assumed for adults, issues about the free speech rights of children have always been problematic…Treating minors as different for free speech purposes has been a recurring feature of obscenity law. Although the Supreme Court reaffirmed in Pinkus v. United States (1978) that it is impermissible to judge the obscenity of material directed primarily to adults on the basis of its possible effect on children, the Court has also held in Ginsberg v. New York (1968) that where sexually explicit material is directed at juvenile readers or viewers it is permissible to apply the test for obscenity in light of a juvenile rather than an adult audience.
To then state (as the ALA does) that “[c]hildren and young adults unquestionably possess First Amendment rights” isn’t entirely accurate.
For sake of comparison, the LBOR’s libertarian position on the unfettered information rights of children stands in contrast to that of the International Federation of Library Associations, which states in its Professional Code of Ethics for Librarians under its section concerning “Responsibilities Towards Individuals and Society,”
Librarians and other information workers respect the protection of minors while ensuring this does not impact on the information rights of adults.
In other words, it is viewed by IFLA as an ethical commitment to both children and to society that minors be protected from exposure to certain content in the library. As we shall see, there is actually substantial support for this view in the LIS literature.
Shirley Wiegand, in her 1996 Library Trends article “Reality Bites: The Collision of Rhetoric, Rights, and Reality and the Library Bill of Rights,” argued that the Library Bill of Rights was legally untenable in that it was filled with aspirational rhetoric that was inconsistent with actual principles and precedents grounded in law, and as such anything solely aspirational should be edited out to form its own document. Wiegand (who along with her husband Wayne, was the recipient of ALA’s 2019 Gleason Award for their 2018 book, The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism), took particular note of the LBOR’s view of minors, writing,
How can one possibly reconcile the Library Bill of Rights with current legal principles concerning minors? The library policy would give free unrestricted use of the library and library materials to minors to the same extent that it gives adults. But the legal system recognizes a clear distinction between the two groups, refusing to provide to minors the same rights guaranteed to adults. No matter how strongly the library profession believes in the minor’s right of access, no matter how strongly worded the Library Bill of Rights, an argument in favor of providing minors with the full panoply of rights would fail in a court of law (p. 79).
In their 2000 article, “The Ethical Presuppositions Behind the Library Bill of Rights,” authors Martin Frick, Kay Mathiesen, and Don Fallis argued that
there seem to be at least some cases where access [to library materials] should be denied on the basis of an involuntary feature. For example, if part of a library's collection is unsuitable for children, young people might be excluded from that part on the grounds that access could hurt them. Public libraries are typically a composite of children-suitable and not-children-suitable material, and…children really only have a right to access one part. In this case, access is denied in order to prevent harm to the patron herself (p. 484).
The authors go on to propose that a corresponding stance of paternalism concerning young readers is an appropriate ethical position for the library profession to take—and that it is something on which “everyone including librarians, parents, and the rest of society-agrees…is in order” (p. 485), going so far as to compare the unrestrained access on the part of children to all materials in the library to allowing child to experiment with electrical outlets:
It is reasonable to assume that no parents want their child to stick a fork in a light socket. And if the parents did want their child to do so, this would give us reason to think the parents unfit. It is reasonable to assume that parents would not want their child accessing hard-core pornography. Thus, by stopping a child from accessing such material, you are not "taking over" from the parent; you are helping the parent. Librarians should not stand by and watch a child "electrocute" herself, let alone help the child find a fork (which seems to be the present ALA policy) (p. 485).
While the profession recognizes the responsibility of parents to guide their children, the authors conclude that, while
[t]he whole area is complex and subtle…there is an ethical role for librarians, and there are parental responsibilities that librarians should try to meet. As [ALA President 2001-2002] John Berry puts it, "nor must we deprive [children] of the nurture, the helping hand, the guidance, the tools for seeking truth and knowing when it is discovered. We cannot simply turn them loose in our jaded information society without helping them understand that some of the information is false, is evil, is dangerous, is misleading, or is ambiguous.... That may not be a legal obligation, but it is clearly a moral duty for every librarian, every teacher, every parent and person in a free society" (p. 485-6).
The issue of the protection of minors in libraries is dealt with at length by Kenneth Einar Himma and Herman Tavani in their 2008 book, The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. Concurring with Shirley Weigand’s view that the maximalist interpretation of children’s intellectual freedoms in the LBOR is not entirely supported by U.S. law, they write,
[w]hen defending its position [that it is not the business of anyone else in the society to aid parents in restricting their children’s access to information], the ALA…frequently appeals to the U.S. Constitution to support their position and state that “children have first amendment rights.” This blanket statement, however, fails to capture the more complex state of constitutional law with regard to children’s first amendment rights. While the U.S. Supreme Court has determined that children have some first amendment rights, they have also held that these rights are more limited than those of adults. Indeed, the Court has argued that there is a role for the state in “protecting” children from certain sorts of content…The court also argued that the state has a role in supporting the parents in carrying out their parental responsibilities [emphasis added]…On this view, there is a legitimate role for the state, and perhaps for such state institutions as the public library, in protecting minors from content that is thought to be harmful to minors (p. 28).
In any event, we need a more philosophically informed consideration of the question of what limits, if any, there should be to children’s access to information. An argument that children have the identical intellectual freedom rights as adults would be difficult to make (29)…[I]t is not clear that the arguments for the importance of free access to information fully apply to children…There is evidence that children’s cognitive abilities and capacities for independent decision-making and self-control are significantly limited as compared to adults. Many of the standard arguments for why persons have a right to access information, such as arguments based on autonomy, free choice, etc., which depend on the sorts of cognitive capacities that children lack, do not easily transfer to the case of children…Interestingly, even those who argue very strongly for children’s information rights, such as Heins (2004), agree that the idea of intellectual freedom has “little meaning” before around 7 years of age, or “the age of reason” (252). Of course, many might dispute setting the line at 7 years of age. Clearly there is no one “correct” standard for what is the age at which children are sufficiently adult to merit full intellectual freedom. But, this does not mean that such standards are completely arbitrary. Where we draw the lines may depend on our information about normal cognitive development in children or the age at which children are expected to take on adult roles and responsibilities in a particular society…If librarians really care about the current and future intellectual freedom of minors, then merely providing minors with access to all possible content is probably not what is required. This is not to say that individual librarians ought to be making on-the-fly decisions about what individual children should or should not read. What it does say is that promoting the intellectual freedom of children may require quite different sorts of responses than it does in the case of adults (pp. 234-236).
I’m aware of course that these excerpts don’t constitute a literature review per se, but they do demonstrate that there is a mainstream, non-partisan, and nuanced dissenting argument from the stance long championed by the ALA, one that might inform the articulation of policy alternatives.
"Unrestricted access" to all materials in a public Library for young readers might have seemed an edifying goal in 1939, when the most sexually explicit content might have been an anatomy textbook. But of course the whole issue isn't even about unrestricted access to adult content in adult sections of the library; it's about sexually frank content aimed at young readers in children's areas, or in school libraries which must accommodate reading levels from K-12. By not distinguishing in the LBOR between the child and adult reader—or the gradations of reading sophistication and maturity within the child/youth category—there is no reasonable barrier to directing adult content at minors.
Based on the above analysis and excerpts from the literature, I think we can draw some conclusions regarding the Library Bill of Rights as it relates to young readers:
In short, I would argue that the Library Bill of Rights is no longer fit for purpose where children are concerned. Not only has it failed to facilitate reasonable dialogue about the evolving state of children’s materials, it has had dire political and indeed existential consequences for the Association. In a politically-charged and polarized environment such as is the United States, it is unfortunate and indeed tragic that a profession that has been traditionally committed to supporting and informing democracy should itself be so divided.
But I think there may be a way forward.
As mentioned above, the International Federation of Library Associations holds the “protection of minors” as a key ethical commitment not just to children and their families, but to society (this statement was also adopted by the Canadian Federation of Library Associations). The recently-formed Association of Library Professionals (of which I am a founding member) states in its FAQ page that
Consistent with the Code of Ethics of the International Federation of Library Associations, ALP respects the protection of minors while ensuring this does not negatively impact the information rights of adults. This means due consideration for age-appropriateness in the organization and collection development policies of children’s collections in public libraries, as well as the responsibility of school libraries to act in loco parentis (in the place of parents). This also means that our members take seriously the concerns of parents regarding the age-appropriateness of children’s materials, and don’t automatically dismiss them as arising out of bigotry.
I therefore believe that the Library Bill of Rights should be revised to address in a more holistic manner the intellectual freedom rights of minors, in order to be more aligned with that of the IFLA and aimed at identifying and facilitating the gradually-maturing rights and needs of young readers, as well as offering library professionals the tools they need to make evidence-based and culturally-sensitive decisions about their collections. I suggest that such a statement should:
If I may, I would recommend wording to the effect of:
Librarians recognize the right of young readers to explore reading materials of ever-greater difficulty, complexity and maturity—under the gradually diminishing guidance of their parents or guardians—as they grow up. However, the library also has the obligation to facilitate this gradual (and individually differentiated) cognitive and emotional developmental process by organizing materials aimed at each broadly-defined reading level spatially in an intuitive manner, so as to enable children and their parents or guardians to readily distinguish between these levels in confidence and to make their decisions accordingly and avoid content they may find potentially harmful; and librarians the obligation to exercise reasonable discretion in their purchasing decisions as to the developmentally-appropriate nature of the content intended for those reading levels. Finally, librarians also recognize the right of parents and community members (representing a diversity of cultural and faith traditions) to express their objections to items in children’s collections, and therefore should commit to addressing these in good faith, presuming that many of these objections will originate in sincerely-held beliefs regarding child-rearing, rather than hatred or bigotry directed against groups or individuals.
To be clear: had the LBOR since 1939 always made the distinction between the intellectual freedom rights of children and adults, this would likely have had little bearing on recent developments in children’s publishing or the presence of controversy regarding certain titles concerning sex and gender. But at least—I think—we would now be better-equipped as a profession to engage in a reasoned debate about these issues with our stakeholder communities—one in which librarians were not facing the prospect of felony charges, and parents’ groups blanket condemnations of bigotry.
This is obviously a hotly-contested topic that has aroused intense passion from across the political spectrum, with even old-school liberals like Bill Maher becoming increasingly aware of and concerned with this issue. Anything that relates to our shared precious investment in the future—our children—will inevitably be controversial, so this is a conflict that won’t be easily resolved. However, perhaps if we as a profession can establish more stable, robust rhetorical ground on which to stand, then maybe we can at least lower the temperature on the debate.
I would like to thank my colleagues in Heterodox Libraries, FAIR in Libraries, and the Association of Library Professionals, for their comments and suggestions in the drafting of this article.
Fricke, Martin, Kay Mathiesen, and Don Fallis. 2000. “The Ethical Presuppositions Behind the Library Bill of Rights.” Library Quarterly 70 (4): 468–91.
Himma, Kenneth Einar, and Herman T Tavani. 2008. The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
Hunter, Clarence W. 1992. “The Integration of the Mississippi Library Association,” Mississippi Libraries 56, no. 3: 69-70.
Mori C, Park J, Racine N, Ganshorn H, Hartwick C, Madigan S. 2023. Exposure to sexual content and problematic sexual behaviors in children and adolescents: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Child Abuse Negl. Sep;143:106255. doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2023.106255. Epub 2023 Jun 19. PMID: 37343427.
Weigand, Shirley A. 1996. “Reality Bites: The Collision of Rhetoric, Rights, and Reality and the Library Bill of Rights.” Library Trends 45 (1): 75–86.
Michael Dudley is a Canadian academic librarian at the University of Winnipeg. He has a Master's degrees in Library and Information Studies and in City Planning. He publishes a Substack called "Heterodoxy in the Stacks". You can learn more about it, and subscribe here: https://hxlibraries.substack.com/
