House panel Oks ban on book bans

SANTA FE -- A bill before the state Legislature to make it harder to remove books from public libraries based on objections to their content took a step forward Thursday evening.

House Bill 123 made it out of the House Consumer and Public Affairs Committee on a 4-2 party-line vote. Sponsored by five Albuquerque-area Democrats, the bill would take state funding away from public libraries that remove books "because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval or the author's race, nationality, gender identity, sexual orientation or political or religious views." It would also ban lower levels of government from cutting library funding based on their compliance with the law.

"We believe that access to free information and the exchange of ideas is a crucial element for the thriving of our democracy," Daniel Williams, a policy advocate with the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, told the committee.

Williams said the local public library was his childhood window to the wider world outside of his hometown of Raton.

"I pursued the career that I pursued because of books that I checked out from the library," he said. "And it would have been a shame if my ability to do that had been limited by ideological, racial, sexual orientation biases that could have removed books from the collection."

"Book bans" have become yet another fault line in the culture wars in recent years, as lawmakers in some states have sought to restrict books they view as inappropriate for children. In New Mexico, some conservatives unsuccessfully pushed the Rio Rancho City Council last year to remove books dealing with LGBTQ+ topics from the city's public library, which Rep. Kathleen Cates, D-Rio Rancho, one of the bill's sponsors, has cited as a reason for supporting the bill.

Reps. Stefani Lord, R-Sandia Park, and John Block, R-Alamogordo, who voted against the bill, said they don't want to ban books, but they worry about children accessing age-inappropriate sexual content.

They asked the bill's sponsors about what sort of restrictions exist to stop young children from reading or checking out such materials and said communities should be allowed to restrict them.

"If the majority of people there don't want them, what you're saying is 'too bad.' ... And I don't think that's fair to places like Edgewood or other communities that don't want them," Lord said.