LOS ANGELES (CN) — Library goers hit now-famously conservative Southern California enclave Huntington Beach with a lawsuit on Thursday over new rules that restrict minors’ access to public library books deemed “sexually explicit.”
A transgender advocacy nonprofit, Alianza Translatinx, along with two unnamed Huntington Beach teenagers and one named adult, Erin Spivey, a longtime librarian filed the suit in Orange County Superior Court.
“Libraries should reflect, not erase, and be spaces where young people can discover who they are,” said Alianza Translatinx CEO Khloe Rios-Wyatt in a written statement. “Huntington Beach officials, driven by fear of challenging ideas, are trying to erase stories and identities — but we refuse to be erased.”
In 2023, Huntington Beach’s Republican-controlled city council passed an ordinance setting up a system for reviewing each of the library system’s roughly 300,000 items, with the aim of setting up “safeguards that would prevent minor access to age-inappropriate, obscene, pornographic and/or sexually explicit materials in city libraries.”
Later ordinances placed books and other materials with “sexual writing, sexual references, sexual images, and/or other sexual content” in the adults’ section. The council also set up a 21-member “review board” to oversee the library system’s purchasing of new materials.
The plaintiffs say, in their complaint, that this review board has “unfettered power to restrict books for nearly any conceivable reason — or no reason at all.”
The new rules went into effect in 2024. The plaintiffs say that because the resolutions never bothered defining the term “sexual content,” the library director told her staff to use Wikipedia’s definition. The staff removed a number of books and DVDS from the children’s sections, including Disney movies, youth bibles and materials with “images of uncovered body parts that would otherwise be covered by a bathing suit.”
It’s unclear just how restricted minors’ access to library books is under the new rules. There are currently three types of library cards — one for adults, one for teenagers between 13 and 17, and one for minors under 13.
The plaintiffs admit in their complaint that “patrons holding teen and minor cards can check out any printed materials,” although minors must have a parent with them when they apply for the card.
But, the plaintiffs warn in their complaint, there is a plan currently gestating that would change the system to two library cards: a Youth Restricted card and an All-Access card.
According to the plaintiffs, “Youth Restricted cards will allow minors to access only library materials in the children’s collection. All-Access cards will allow minors to access all library materials in the entire collection.”
The suit equates the new system with “censorship,” and says that it could, in the future, ban minors’ access to such “beloved literary classics such as 1984, Romeo and Juliet and The Great Gatsby.”
Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns said, in a written statement, “The city has maintained its stance that no books have been banned or removed from the library.”
The fracas over the kids section at the library is only the latest in a series of controversial topics the conservative Huntington Beach city council has waded into, including immigration, gender identity and housing. The council recently had a plaque put up in the city’s central library reading, “Magical Alluring Galvanizing Adventurous.”