MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama Public Library Service Board Chair John Wahl praised a decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Thursday that bodes well for the APLS’ recent efforts to remove sexual explicit and gender ideology-based content from children’s sections at public libraries.
Made on May 23, the ruling upheld that a library’s decision to remove books from its shelves cannot be challenged under the First Amendment. While the decision only applies to public libraries in three states – Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas – the precedent it sets favors APLS’ efforts to further curate reading material for young readers, which Wahl called a “major victory” for parental rights.
“This court decision made it clear that moving books that are inappropriate for children out of youth sections is not censorship – it’s responsible stewardship of public libraries and a basic protection for our children,” Wahl said Thursday in a statement.
The APLS Board has in recent years worked to enact policies to allow for the removal of controversial reading material in children’s sections of public libraries, largely content that contains sexually explicit or gender ideology. The board has modified its code to require libraries to remove material, and has gone as far as to pause funding for libraries in noncompliance, such as with Fairhope Public Library.
The board recently floated the idea of more aggressively curating content in children’s sections of public libraries, with APLS Board member Amy Minton proposing a crackdown on all books containing “positive portrayals” of transgender procedures, gender ideology or the concept of there being more than two genders.
The push to further curate reading material accessible to children accelerated in late 2023 after Gov. Kay Ivey and some Republican lawmakers called on the APLS Board to enact policies to more strictly curate reading material for children. Some Republican lawmakers suggested were such policies not enacted, public libraries could lose funding, which they ultimately did to the tune of nearly $400,000 in the 2025 General Fund budget.
The board’s efforts to further curate reading material has been met with both support from Republican lawmakers and organizations such as Clean Up Alabama, and fierce opposition from many library faculty and organizations like Read Freely Alabama. The opposition has largely decried the content curation efforts as an affront on free speech, and discriminatory against members of the LGBTQ community.
To the board’s detractors, however, Wahl called their concerns “overheated rhetoric,” and further praised the federal court’s decision in supporting public libraries’ ability to curate material easily accessible to children.
“The Fifth Circuit saw through the woke hysteria surrounding our libraries and reaffirmed what we’ve said all along: protecting our youth and respecting parents is not censorship,” he said.
“The people trying to paint this as some kind of ‘book ban’ are ignoring the facts as well as the foundation of our legal system. No one is preventing people from buying or reading any book they want. The only question is about whether sexually explicit content belongs in taxpayer-funded public spaces accessible to children. Parents have a right to say no – and that right must be respected.”