Idaho Republicans Push Bill To JAIL Librarians Who Lend Out ‘Banned Books’

Republicans in Idaho are taking the assault on education and the LGBTQ+ community to new heights, as they've proposed legislation that would fine and jail librarians and their staff at schools, universities, and museums if they lend certain books to children. This onslaught of attacks has to be put to an end. These are the same kinds of things that just a few years ago Americans were appalled to see happen in other countries, and now it is happening in our home backyards. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Republicans in the Idaho House of Representatives this week passed legislation that would, like so many other pieces of legislation across the country, criminalize librarians and their staff for lending certain quote, banned books, to children. And the legislation is aptly House bill 666, because that really feels like what the country has become right now, doesn't it. So either way, this piece of legislation, again, Idaho Republicans in the House have passed it. It's gotta go to the Senate now. This easily could become the law of the land in Idaho. And what it says is that librarians and their staff, whether it's librarians at public schools, at universities or at museums, if you give one of these books that we, the Republican controlled state, have determined is in fact pornography, if you lend it to a minor, boom, you get fined $1,000 and up to one year in jail.

Now here's the kicker, folks. There's already laws on the, in place on the books in Idaho that prevent this exact thing. Like it's already illegal to give children, minors, explicitly pornographic material in the state of Idaho, right? You can't walk up to an elementary schooler and say, hey, check out this porn. No, that's illegal. So this bill is unnecessary. Except of course, for the fact that these Republicans aren't actually trying to keep children away from pornography, they're trying to keep them away from books that discuss, whether fictionalized or real, the LGBTQ community. That's what they want to protect our children from. Because these idiots are so terrified that if children learn about gay people, it might turn them gay themselves. Yeah. Just like reading Charlotte's Web turned all of them into spiders, right? Because that's how literature works. No, it broadens horizons. It tells stories. It is art. And you're now depriving these children of a form of art that helps them grow as human beings. You're criminalizing it and you wanna throw librarians in jail over it.

All because you're scared of something that you don't understand. Republicans in Idaho and all over the country would probably do themselves a service if they actually read these books that they're trying to ban across the country. Maybe get a better understanding of what's happening. We are headed back to the dark ages, folks. The attacks on the LGBTQ community this year and of course last year are absolutely insane, what's happening to that community. Right? They're taking us back to the early 19 hundreds when homosexuality was looked at as a mental disease, as a mental disorder. Like you could go to the loony bin for being gay. Like that was your only problem was being gay and say, okay, well obviously this person's insane. Even though homosexuality has a history, as long as human history, on this planet. But they want to make it illegal. And that's the next step. Banning the books for them is not gonna go far enough. Eventually they're gonna have to ban the people themselves. And don't think for a second, that legislation like that, isn't right on the horizon.