This is the context - an Idaho law that penalizes any library that allows minors access to “inappropriate” content, and lets each child’s parent define what “inappropriate” means. So libraries could be penalized if, for example, a homeschooled Christian child reads a book on biology that mentions evolution or a YA novel with a gay character, and their parents object to it. Or if a liberal parent objects to their child reading the Bible or Quran.
Given the wide scope and uncertain limits of this law, some Idaho libraries are banning minors entirely. As was, I suspect, the goal.
Laws like this are becoming widespread in red states and will likely become federal law with Project 2025.
The United States is becoming a nation where parents’ right to keep their kids stupid and bigoted is more important than children’s right to learn. And if that isn’t a sign of collapse I don’t know what is.
And the even more insidious part is that (at least according to what you wrote) the law penalizes the library, not the minor who entered without permission, so teenagers trying to protest the law through civil disobedience by entering the library anyway would only get the library punished harder.
It’s modeled after the Texas abortion law which allowed anyone to sue anyone else who “aided or abetted” a prohibited abortion - so if you were a doctor, a nurse, a driver taking a woman to a clinic, a family member who helped pay for the abortion, any random Texan who knew about the abortion could sue you and get a bounty for doing it.
That law became irrelevant after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, of course. But I believe that strategy - giving ordinary citizens the power to file weaponized lawsuits against your political enemies, giving them a financial incentive to do so, and then turning them loose - is going to be seen as transformative in American politics. It’s one of the greatest Republican legal innovations in the last two decades. It gives those tiny radical conservative special interest groups, populated by Quiverfull homeschooled kids who went to law school and joined the Heritage Foundation to fight for God in the courtroom, an enormous amount of power - and it means, if you’re doing something Republicans don’t like, you have an enormous potential liability, because anyone could sue you at any time. And since you’re guaranteed to have a conservative judge in most jurisdictions in the United States, very few organizations are going to take that risk.
Conservatives spent the last two generations fighting to capture the judicial branch. And they succeeded. And now they’re trying to funnel more and more power away from other branches of government and to the judicial system so they can exploit that power. And they’re doing it very, very, effectively.