A Nebraska bill to subject librarians to charges for giving ‘obscene material’ to children fails

A bill that would have held school librarians and teachers criminally responsible for providing “obscene material” to Nebraska students in grades K-12 failed to break a filibuster Wednesday in the Legislature.

But heated debate over it led the body’s Republican Speaker of the Legislature to slash debate times in half on bills he deemed as covering “social issues” for the remaining 13 days of the session.

State Sen. Joni Albrecht, who introduced the bill, said it simply would close a “loophole” in the state’s existing obscenity laws that prohibit adults from giving such material to minors. But critics panned it as a way for a vocal minority to ban books they don’t like from school and public library shelves.

Book bans and attempted bans soared last year in the U.S. Almost half of the challenged books are about communities of color, LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups, according to a recent report from the American Library Association. Among the books frequently challenged is Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”

Opponents of the bill argued that children are not accessing obscene material as it is currently defined in the law — which would essentially cover graphic pornography and erotica — in school and public libraries.

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