Idaho is one of the few states in the US that hasn’t considered banning the gay and trans panic legal defense. This allows murderers to claim that they acted in a state of heightened panic because their victim was gay or trans and they felt unsafe because of that, in hopes of landing a lighter sentence.
But not to worry, everyone; the good lawmakers over at the Potato State are instead laying the smackdown on libraries, and I presume we will all quickly run out of ways to explain why this is a bad move.
As relayed by TikTokker @katiemreads, House Bill 710 aims to regulate materials found in Idaho libraries that it believes could be harmful to children, and in case you’ve been missing the memo for the past several years now, “harmful to children” isn’t referring to papercut potential.
The bill would allow legal claims to be filed against libraries by parents if they deem certain materials on the shelves harmful to children. If the material is then not moved to a section specifically labeled exclusively for adults within 60 days, the plaintiff could be given $250 in damages as well as injunctive relief, which could force the library to act in accordance with the claim.
Folks, there’s absolutely no way that any erotica novels or pornographic materials are ending up in the children’s section en masse, and if it was, I presume this would have been cracked down on long ago. What, then, could the Idaho Legislature be so concerned with if they’re pushing this bill so hard?
All I can say is, I sure wish we had similar regulations when I was a little boy; maybe then there would have been some legal incentive to stop bombarding me with such uncomfortable questions for a six-year-old like “Is she pretty?”; indeed, the straight agenda isn’t known for its boundaries.