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The American Library Association (ALA) is sounding the alarm as a federal bill seeking to ban “sexually oriented material” in public schools makes its way through Congress.
S.B. 4925 was referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on June 24. Officially named the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,” it defines “sexually oriented material” as “any program, activity, literature, or material that exposes such children to nude adults, individuals who are stripping, or lewd or lascivious dancing,” as well as anything that “involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism.”
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The legislation would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to ban schools from using funding provided through the act to provide students with any of the prohibited material.
A companion bill in the House, H.B. 7661, passed the House Education and Workforce Committee in March, though neither bill is reportedly scheduled to be considered on the House or Senate floors.
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In addition to the explicit ban on anything mentioning trans people, the concept of “sexually oriented material” has become a conservative euphemism for any content mentioning LGBTQ+ identities.
The ALA called the legislation “dangerously broad.”
“Such a sweeping prohibition threatens health, art, and science education,” the organization wrote, urging people to take action. “The bill’s language also targets LGBTQIA+ communities. It’s ideological grandstanding and political overreach, pure and simple. This type of fear-mongering and censorship can’t become law.”
ALA also said the bill “threatens to hand over parents’ rights to lawmakers, letting them decide what books students can access in their school libraries.”
ALA President Sam Helmick also stated that the bill “is not about what is best for children” and “treats seventeen-year-olds the same as kindergarteners.”
They also pointed out that the bill’s “exception for ‘classical art’ is a smokescreen for discrimination against any form of artistic expression that does not comply with an ideology that denies the stories and personhood of certain groups of people, especially LGBTQIA+ people.”
The bill was introduced by Sens. James Lankford (R-OK), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), and Jim Banks (R-IN), and by Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) in the House.
In 2022, Lankford expressed opposition to the Respect for Marriage Act, claiming tax-exempt groups that advocate for banning marriage equality “will be challenged on their tax policy and will immediately become a target of this federal government.”
Banks has a long history of anti-LGBTQ+ views. In 2023, he introduced a bill to ban transgender people from serving in the U.S. military. That same year, he introduced a bill that would cut federal funding to any child welfare agencies and groups that refuse to place trans kids with transphobic foster parents.
In July 2022, he endorsed a national trans sports ban. Banks supports government retaliation against corporations that publicly oppose anti-LGBTQ+ laws. He was also once banned from Twitter (now X) for misgendering a trans female government official and considers drag queens “deeply disturbing and offensive.”
In 2024, Tuberville said Democrats “want women to be extinct” while promoting an anti-trans sports bill. In 2023, he executed a 10-month blockade of over 400 military promotions to protest so-called “woke” military policies that promoted LGBTQ+ inclusion and abortion access.
And at the start of Pride Month this year, Miller introduced a resolution to declare June as “Family Month,” claiming “the American family is under relentless attack from a radical leftist agenda that seeks to erase truth, redefine marriage, and confuse our children.”
She has previously filed legislation to make it a felony to send any explicit adult images to any person for any reason, an anti-transgender bathroom bill she says will fight “radical gender ideology” being pushed “on our children,” and a so-called “women’s rights” bill that would try to redefine “women” in a way that excludes trans women.
Miller has also referred to Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), the only trans congresswoman, as “a gentleman,” called the overturning of abortion rights nationwide a “victory for white life,” and has repeatedly said that climate change is clearly fake because God controls the sun.
In a statement on the book ban bill, Miller said kids need to be protected from “transgender ideology” and that “our taxpayer-funded schools exist to educate children, not expose them to sexually explicit material or promote the false idea that a child can be born in the wrong body.”
The Republican senators also slammed the ALA for opposing the bill, accusing the group of being against protecting children.
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