The Alabama House voted April 25 to make school and public library staff criminally liable for distributing “sexual or gender oriented material” to minors without parental consent.

HB385 places libraries in the same category as “adult-only” stores, movies and entertainment. It would force school and public librarians to remove a book that someone finds obscene or harmful to minors within seven days of written notice to the library director or principal. If they don’t they could face a misdemeanor. A copy of the notice will go to the district attorney.

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Arnold Mooney (R-Shelby County), doesn’t include notice to the librarian presented with the material, and it’s unclear who will determine if the book is obscene. Rep. David Faulkner (R-Jefferson) introduced a substitution to include the seven-day notice to remove the book.

If passed, this law would supersede local library challenge policies, which typically lay out a review process after someone complains about a book. It comes as the legislature also considers cutting state funding for libraries and making funding contingent on moving certain books out of children’s sections.

“This is an effort to protect children,” Mooney said. “It is not a Democrat bill. It is not a Republican bill. It’s a people bill to try to protect children.”

The legislation passed on a vote of 71 to 28 after a lengthy debate.

“You’re just making it easier to be arrested,” said Rep. Chris England (D-Tuscaloosa).

“This is a pig. It is a bad bill, and when you attempt to take what is normally non-criminal conduct and make it criminal, you bend yourself into ways that potentially not only violate the Constitution but potentially subject somebody to an illegal arrest with no due process.”

Rep. Barbara Drummond (D-Mobile) said the bill is “putting lipstick on a pig.”

“It does nothing to protect librarians,” she said. “How do you censor a librarian?” She added that the government “can’t legislate morality.”

Drummond said the bill isn’t truly protecting children, but would prevent them from “from having an open mind” and “from reading and thinking and using the cognitive abilities that God has given them.”

Rep. Danny Garrett (R-Jefferson County) disagreed and said, “we woke up one day and things changed that people didn’t understand were changing.”

Garrett incorrectly claimed that the American Library Association’s Bill of Rights says that children have the right to access any book in the library. The national organization says that people of all ages should be able to use the library, but allows for age-restricted access to certain content.

The bill removes current law’s obscenity exemption for libraries. Also, it bans “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 in K-12 public schools, public libraries, and other public places where minors are expected and are known to be present without parental consent.”

Rep. Mary Moore (D-Jefferson) contended this could include students wearing revealing prom dresses at school.

“Some of them would be under the jail because of this,” she said.

The code still includes the “Miller test,” a three-step test to determine what is obscene. The test stemmed from the 1973 Supreme Court case Miller v. California. The three-prong test says that a work is obscene if it is generally believed to be inappropriate for children, sexually explicit and lacks literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

The bill now heads to the Senate.