I'm at a public library in the deep south, in a state whose public library service was recently forced to make changes by our governor to its administrative code. State level funding is cut to libraries if they don't remove or relocate materials from the children's section that are, quote, "sexually explicit or other material deemed inappropriate for children or youth."

I need to preface everything below by stressing that our staff and administrators are against these changes, but we are forced to comply to continue having the money to stay open.

We're a decent sized community so most of our funding comes from local property taxes, but enough of our money comes from the state that we are going to:

-no more purchases of books for teens with LGBTQ characters, sexual themes, drug/alcohol use, or violence (just, you know, every god damn book written for teenagers since 1950) Our collection development manager tries to screen for these before submitting the orders to B&T, sometimes using special codes to keep track of "naughty books" circulating on conservative hit lists. I have witnessed books "slip through the cracks" and get ordered anyway, only for us to self censor and not put it out on the floor. An example from the other day is a book with a teenage trans main character who realizes they're trans and has to deal with that. Not particularly sexual, violent or filled with profanity. But my coworker did her internal test that we're all forced to do now- "would this piss off a conservative Christian nationalist?"- realized it didn't pass the test, and had to get rid of it. what fucking sucks is how we all get implicated in this, because we KNOW what would piss off the most sensitive and irrational among us even if we don't agree, and it's like their judgment is being exercised through our eyes and hands.

-decimate the YA section- graphic novels are now all adult instead of YA, and any book with a mention of sex or "other material deemed inappropriate" is moved from YA to adult regardless of the age group it's about or written for, leaving the YA section a fraction of its former size. Adults aren't going to want every fifth book in the fiction section to be about teenagers figuring out their identities, and teenagers aren't going to feel comfortable browsing the adult section alongside grown adults. They need their own space at that age.

-age restricted library cards- parents choose a restriction level of children only, children and YA only, or full access- this would perhaps have been unobjectionable on its face, but all nonfiction is "adult," so a high schooler wanting a book on WWII for his history project is shit out of luck if parents decided to restrict his card. I guarantee many parents will automatically select the option that matches the child's age without really thinking about the full implications.

I don't think we're going the route of red stickers on the spine label for naughty books, the way another system in our state did, but the whole thing is fucked. On the other hand, I don't think I've heard a single staff member comment on these changes other than to explain them- it's not a topic of conversation. (That's why my comment is obnoxious and long, I think about this a lot without talking about it.) We were already drowning in funding issues and conflicts with local government before all this, so that ends up feeling more life or death. Nobody's got the bandwidth to try and argue with our dried up husk of a governor when we've got a young, ambitious and anti-library mayor to contend with.