The Indiana State Senate has passed a bill that would allow parents and guardians to file criminal charges against K-12 and public librarians for allowing minors to check out “harmful material.”
Five senators once again debated the content and mechanism — or lack thereof — of Senate Bill 17 before the chamber voted 34-15 to pass it on third reading Tuesday afternoon. It’ll now go to the House.
Companion House legislation, House Bill 1097, wasn’t taken up.
Bill architect Sen. James Tomes, R-Wadesville, insisted once again that all the bill does is take the word “education” out as a defense for a librarian who would allow a minor to check out material deemed “harmful.” He also reiterated that in order to be deemed harmful, the material would have to meet all four criteria: It has to describe nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement or sadomasochism; it must “appeal to sex with minors”; it must be “patently offensive to prevailing standards”; and it “lacks serious scientific, literary, political or educational value for minors” when considered as a whole.
“Your typical classics — Renaissance photos, passages from the Bible — don’t apply,” Tomes said. “Books like ‘Catcher in the Rye’ wouldn’t apply because they don’t meet the four criteria.”
In a heated exchange with Tomes, Sen. Greg Taylor, D-Indianapolis, asked Tomes whether a 12th grader can be 18 years old. Tomes admitted they could but said the purpose of the bill was to keep the material out of K-12 students’ hands.
“If somebody wants to violate this law and challenge it and play the odds, they can’t just say, ‘It was educational,’” Tomes said. “Let’s be honest and upfront and act like adults — we’re talking about raw pornography.”
Taylor then explained that he had a hard time with reading “Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain when he was in elementary school because of its use of racial epithets, but the book remains educational and necessary.
“Yes, I got two educations: One, I had to realize that word is used over and over again. You talk about rap — I also saw it in the town where I lived to describe what my grandfather was, and (the people who use the word) don’t understand the meaning of it or anything else,” Taylor, who’s Black, said. “So my mother taught me what it means. But you just took out ‘educational’ as a defense. I didn’t.”
Tomes said he didn’t want to get “drifted off” and said again that an offender can’t use “education” as a defense.
Sen. Fady Qaddoura, D-Indianapolis, said that while he doesn’t want his daughters exposed to filth, either, the punishment is too extreme when there are already systems in place to deal with questionable material.
“It takes a complaint all of the way to prosecution. There’s no in-between,” Qaddoura said. “We’re not disputing the principle of protecting our kids.”
Sen. J.D. Ford, D-Indianapolis, asked who’s going to measure what’s harmful to minors and how will it be measured.
“Are you going to survey 5-year-olds: ‘Are you sexually excited?’ It doesn’t make sense,” Ford said. “I’ll use an example that I hope can resonate with all of us: People showing up at our schools with loaded guns around minors, and in previous sessions when we talked about it, the argument was, ‘Democrats are trying to take our guns away.’ The NRA memberships went up, and guess what happened? There are more guns.
“So you are actually promoting the same books you’re trying to ban.”
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