Huntington Beach Councilmember Gracey Van Der Mark said there are obscene and pornographic books available to children in city libraries and she is asking the City Council to support drafting a new law to screen out the material at its Tuesday, June 20, meeting.
In a request to her council colleagues, Van Der Mark said it has been a problem nationally “in public education that children are being exposed to obscene, and age-inappropriate material by adults, many of whom are educators we have entrusted with our children. Not too long ago, I learned that our city public libraries also provide similar obscene materials to our youth in the form of obscene and at times pornographic children’s books. Our city libraries should not be engaged in infecting our children with obscenity or pornography.”
Van Der Mark said there are several books at Huntington Beach Public Library branches that she and other parents find too sexually explicit for children to check out. She emphasized that her proposal doesn’t say to remove or ban books, but rather she wants to look at making those books inaccessible to children to check out on their own. She’s asking for city staff to come up with specific policies to make that possible.
“We just want to make what is considered obscene inaccessible to children,” Van Der Mark said in a Friday interview. “That doesn’t mean their parents can’t check them out.”
Van Der Mark said she will present several examples of books found at city libraries that she says are too sexually explicit for children, including a collection of essays by women about losing their virginity in their teens that she said she found in the teen section at the Huntington Beach Central Library.
She is asking the council to have the city manager and city attorney draft the ordinance to keep the material from being available to children, including asking for a process to screen new books. The city attorney would evaluate if any books asked to be reviewed can be banned under the First Amendment.
Councilmember Natalie Moser sees the proposal as a slippery slope that could lead to censorship and restriction of materials from public consumption.
“That’s a huge fear that I have,” Moser said. “I can’t believe that we are in this place in this moment.”
Huntington Beach residents and nonprofits are already saying they plan to organize against having anyone but librarians choosing what goes on the shelves.
“It’s always been on librarians who are hired and are educated to know what books are appropriate for the community,” said Carol Daus, a board member for the nonprofit Friends of the Huntington Beach Public Library. She said Van Der Mark’s proposal caught the group off guard and also called it a form of censorship.
“We would be outraged if this comes to fruition,” the 28-year city resident said.
If the City Council approves Van Der Mark’s proposal on Tuesday, the city attorney would be asked to have the draft law ready by August.
First Amendment Coalition Legal Director David Loy said what is considered obscene under the constitution is extremely limited. The total work has to lack any literary, artistic, political or scientific value, he said.
“That is a very demanding standard, much stricter and narrower than what many people may think is ‘obscene,’” he said, adding that people can’t cherry-pick small excerpts of content from books that they find disagreeable for justifying the entire work as obscene.
State officials on June 1 sent a letter cautioning schools against book bans. The letter said the Attorney General’s office could reach out to schools to review the procedures and any books removed.
Allison Lee, managing director of PEN America in Los Angeles, a literary and human rights organization, said having a city remove books, rather than a school district, isn’t a strategy she’s seen before.
“The entire wave of book bans is also a way to have a chilling effect on free expression,” she added.
But times have changed, Van Der Mark said. “Our policies need to be updated to accommodate those changes and protect our kids.”
Huntington Beach owns five public libraries. Van Der Mark also asked for the city to consider parting ways with the nonprofit American Library Association.
