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Welcome to Alabama, where an 18-year-old can go to war but can’t check out Moana from the local library.
That’s right, in the latest effort to appease insane people who want to govern every possible portion of your life and force all of society to adhere to their super-weird aversion to talking to their children about anything that might actually happen in the real world, it is now the policy of the Huntsville Library system that PG-rated movies – including some classic Disney animated films, like Moana, Frozen and Coco – are now being moved to the young adult section.
That section, under its new tiered card system, allows access only to Tier 2 and Tier 3 card holders. Adult cards aren’t available until a person turns 19. And no one under 19 can obtain a card for a tier level above Tier 1 without parental permission.
Which means, if your mom or dad can’t make it to the library, you can drive yourself up there, stop off at the recruiting station and sign up for any branch and even cast a vote in any election, but you can’t watch Elsa and Anna save Arendale.
If this all sounds unbelievably stupid, it’s because it is. And it’s not the employees of the library who are at fault.
As Connie Chow, interim director of the Huntsville-Madison County Library system, told APR last week, the decision to move the movies comes in response to new guidelines imposed by the Alabama Public Library Service. The APLS, if you haven’t followed reporting over the past year, has been infested with rightwing lunatics.
The new guidelines, the APLS said earlier this year, were passed in an effort to prevent kids from being exposed to sexually explicit material. The guidelines carried with them threats of losing funding for libraries that failed to comply.
To be clear, what they were most worried about were books that contained references to gay people. And especially gay people carrying on with perfectly normal, everyday lives.
Oh, and some of them seemed to be particularly interested in removing the books that spotlight the warning signs of sexual abuse and assault, particularly the books that explain to children how trusted adults might be violating them and how to alert authorities to the abuse. I can only think of one reason you’d want those books removed.
But then, there I go trying to inject common sense and reason into this. And trust me, there is none.
Just the fact that this is happening is pure insanity. I mean, take a step back for a moment and let’s take a look at Alabama’s school-aged children and all of the problems that might affect their lives. List off the problems in your head – guns, poverty, guns, food insecurity, guns, learning disabilities, guns, unstable home lives, guns, bullying, guns, underfunded schools, guns.
Now, tell me where “access to PG movies” ranks for you.
I’ve got to hand it to the conservative propaganda machine – it’s amazingly effective at using outrage, fear and biases to motivate a specific group of people to care about astoundingly insignificant things.
This state has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancies in the country, the worst rate of sexually transmitted diseases among teens in the country and the fifth-worst rate of gun deaths per capita.
And somehow, the one issue that managed to motivate our governor, the executive director of the party that holds a supermajority and several members of our legislature to take significant action was … BOOKS!
Because they allegedly believe that children are bypassing the 8,000 channels available through their streaming TVs and ignoring the endless supply of porn on every device they can access and are instead sneaking out to the public library to steal glances at animated drawings of cartoon characters that illustrate proper descriptions of genitalia. If that’s the case at your house, you’re either raising a future medical doctor or a serial killer, but either way, access to the books ain’t changing that path.
But let’s be real: It’s not about that. Not for most of them.
Sure, there are a handful of true believing book nazis out there who want to govern every child based on their narrow view of the world. But the rest of these people fall into two categories.
First, are the political animals. They don’t care about any of this – not really. They’re just using it for the pandering and the outrage and the easy votes. It’s another culture war issue where they can both define and then lay claim to the moral high ground.
And there’s an added bonus for that first group: this nonsense produces more ignorant people, who are easy to scare, and thus, easy to control. Which brings us to the second category.
The fearful intolerant. They’re scared to death of everyone and everything that’s different, and they truly fear that the books with LGBTQ+ characters will turn their kids, and other kids, gay. They think that normalizing LGBTQ+ people creates more LGBTQ+ people, and not that it simply encourages more people to stop living lies and suppressing their feelings.
And for many of them, what they fear most is having to explore their own feelings, and particularly their own irrational hatred of other humans.
The truth is that for all of these people the library remains the biggest threat. Because within its walls are stories and truths and facts that lay bare the real world. Books that expose kids to the unknown people and worlds all around them. Books that remove the mysteries from different lifestyles and different religions and different people. Books that let them know it’ll all be OK and we’re all just people trying to get by. Books that make it really, really hard to hate, to ridicule, to bully and to belittle.
Books that make them want to be better humans.
And that’s why we’re having this fight.
