Little was right to veto this year’s book-burning bill. But the censors will be back | Opinion

Gov. Brad Little did the right thing Wednesday night by vetoing House Bill 314, which would subject schools and libraries to bounty lawsuits for having in the stacks material which is judged to be inappropriate for kids, according to unknowable standards.

The bill had passed by large Republican majorities in both the House and Senate — though Democrats and large segments of the GOP opposed it. The bill was four votes shy of a veto-proof majority in the House, so an override seems unlikely.

In Little’s veto statement, he outlined how the bill would establish a system of incentives that would irreparably damage libraries.

“Allowing any parent, regardless of intention, to collect $2,500 in automatic fines creates a library bounty system that will only increase the costs local libraries incur, particularly rural libraries,” Little wrote.

This is exactly correct. And that’s with the watered-down version of the bill that made it onto Little’s desk.

Originally, the Idaho Family Policy Center wrote a law that would award $10,000 per offending book. In a small-town library, that might be years of new book budgets.

There is a consistent pattern in the legislation that’s been crafted in recent years to target libraries. Instead of directly banning books, they aim to establish a legal climate where libraries impose self-censorship.

They are attempting to achieve these ends with two tools: Harsh penalties, which make lawsuits or criminal sanctions existential threats to any library operating in Idaho, and ambiguous standards, which mean those libraries can’t predict what books or movies open them to these penalties. If you can’t survive a violation, and you’re never quite sure what constitutes a violation, you’ll narrowly restrict what’s available.

And you won’t want to help people who come in looking for books — they could be a prospective bounty hunter looking for a payday of thousands of dollars, who’s trying to catch any possible misstep. So you have to be afraid of your patrons.

This fear is the whole point, the mechanism that would allow censorship to take hold.

The efforts to impose censorship in libraries have been undertaken not only foolishly but in bad faith from the start. This controversy did not start because large numbers of parents suddenly all at once discovered that their children had brought home a bunch of books they think are inappropriate.

In nearly all cases, people who are committed to using government force to change the culture sought out books they thought would be unpopular and easy to attack. And they used unpopular books to attack the availability of entire genres: sex education materials and materials that relate to the LGBTQ community.

This is the trick of every censor: to focus on speech that’s despised. The often-repeated maxim that supporting free speech only means anything when it’s for unpopular speech is often repeated because it’s true.

Don’t think this fight is over.

Last legislative session, the threat was to make it possible to jail librarians. This year, the threat was to have bounty-seeking litigants bankrupt libraries.

There are other ways of imposing censorship, and those who seek that end will be back next year.