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Changes to the administrative code at the Alabama Public Library Service are finally official after months of debate.
The new code took effect Monday, with the Legislative Council on Administrative Rule Review declining to consider the changes despite the Alabama Library Association and Read Freely Alabama calling on the body to stop the changes.
The new code requires libraries to adopt certain policies to receive state aid, including keeping “sexually explicit” materials off of shelves for minors. It also calls on library boards to adopt other policies as necessary to keep materials “inappropriate for children or youth” out of those sections, but does not define what is inappropriate.
Different library boards can handle that in different ways. The Ozark-Dale library board determined that only sexually explicit materials are inappropriate for minors. The Prattville library board, facing a federal lawsuit, took a more complicated route that appears to classify many materials for minors as inappropriate including materials that “have mature themes such as sexual abuse, sexual orientation and transgender ideology.”
Although libraries will need to comply to the new code to receive state aid, there is still time for libraries to determine how they will proceed to satisfy the new requirements for state aid.
In an email last month regarding the code changes, APLS director Nancy Pack said that the code won’t affect state aid until the new fiscal year. Libraries will need to have their new policies in place in order to receive aid at the start of the new fiscal year.
Pack is actually giving the libraries until June 2025, however, to receive their full state aid if they pass new policies before that deadline. But funding will not be dispersed until a library has updated its policies to reflect the new requirements.
The code changes are the result of challenges in libraries across the state, with claims that libraries are trafficking in pornographic materials for minors. That claim has been repeated at the highest levels of state government, with Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth Monday accusing the “radical left” of “placing pornography in children’s areas of libraries.”
Yet there are only a handful of books that have been challenged in Alabama with illustrated depictions of sex or nudity, the majority of which are intended as sex education books. The book “Gender Queer” is a graphic memoir originally written for an adult audience that sometimes is placed in sections for teens 16 and up, and contains a few explicit depictions of nudity or sexual acts.
The code changes were altered to more closely align with the desires of book challengers such as Clean Up Alabama, Eagle Forum and Moms for Liberty who have been driving the controversy for the past year. The changes are likely to create burdensome costs for libraries, according to the Alabama Library Association.
For example, libraries will now be required to have library cards for minors that allow them only to check out materials from youth sections—a system that ALLA says can cost about $15,000. For smaller, rural libraries that represents a significant portion of their annual budget. Some smaller libraries also may have to make purchases in an attempt to appropriately divide sections as a lack of space prevents them from having distinct separations between adult and youth sections.
In other states, some small libraries have become adult-only rather than risk violating laws or losing funding.
The APLS board does not meet again until September unless a special meeting is called.
