No need for a lengthy introduction. This newsletter will be long enough in its own right. We’re going to finish taking a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly library bills that have emerged in state legislatures so far this year.

This is the second of a two-part series, and it will cover the bad and ugly bills alphabetically from Indiana onward, as well as good bills/good news alphabetically from Maryland onward. Part one of the series is available here.

As a reminder, if you live in a state with a bad bill–or in the one state here with a really great one on the table–take the time to email and/or call your representatives. This will give you an idea of the current status of the bills, helping facilitate who to prioritize in your advocacy.

Bad & Ugly

Indiana: Senate Bill 4 and Senate Bill 8

Indiana’s GOP legislators have been cruel to libraries for years. This year’s trick will be felt by residents for generations–if they have libraries available to them at all.

SB 4 and SB 8 aimed to build upon legislation passed last year that cut property taxes available to government units like libraries. SB 4 would have required libraries to get permission from a local governing body for their annual funding. This would have meant libraries had no idea what their budget would be year by year, since they’d need approval every single year. That approval would, of course, be impacted by the person in charge of making those calls. They don’t like the library? The library won’t be getting money.

SB 4 died, but many of the people who were excited about it signed on to another bill, SB 8. This one would have forced libraries to accept a lower annual growth rate than any other governing body. It wasn’t just “lower” by a little. They’d have to accept HALF the growth rate of other government institutions funded by tax money.

Thanks to advocacy across the state, SB 8 died. But . . .

Indiana: House Enrolled Act 1406

HEA 1406 passed through Indiana legislation quickly and takes pieces of the above bills, making the situation for library funding in the state even worse. Indiana libraries now have to decide whether they want to get permission from their local government for a budget OR accept a smaller annual growth rate than any other governing body covered by tax money. The bar isn’t 50% now, either. Libraries could lose their entire budget if they choose the second option (they could lose it entirely if they choose the first one, too, to be clear).

This is a nasty game being played by the Indiana GOP. They’ve elected to target public libraries in this new law specifically, and it’s going to have the greatest impact on the small and rural libraries serving the very people the GOP claims they care most about.

Read more about the bill and its potential impact here. Libraries have to decide between bad and bad; in either case, they literally cannot plan for the future because there is no guarantee they’ll even get a budget.

Iowa: House Bill 2309

There are a lot of really bad bills in Iowa. I’m unable to go deep into the nuances of each one, and that’s kind of the point: Republicans want people overwhelmed by so many bills that they become indistinguishable. Action cannot progress if people are trying to parse one bill from another when the impact from one bill or the total of all of them is simply “bad.”*

HB 2309 would create restrictions in public libraries so that they could not distribute material deemed “harmful to minors.” No such materials exist in public libraries, and the phrasing here is intentionally vague. The bill would require libraries to designate areas as “adult,” and no one under 18 could access them without a parent present. This would be a section of the library with all of the white classics that these same republicans uphold as crucial literature for young people to read, of course.

As of February 12, this bill was recommended in a House subcommittee. There’s been no movement on it since.

Iowa: House Bill 2622

One reason there’s been little progress on HB 2309 is that HB 2622 is quite similar. It’s another bill that would require segregation of material and limited access to material for minors in public libraries. This bill would do something similar to what’s being done in South Carolina (and what’s been decimating South Carolina libraries, see here and here). Each public library would need to certify to the state library that there is no inappropriate material accessible to young people to receive state funding.

This bill also permits parents/guardians access to their children's borrowing records. It’s a blatant violation of privacy, and something that’s emerging in more state-level legislation (see: New Hampshire).

HB 2622 would also kill library boards by transferring the board's power to city officials. This has already been attempted in Iowa. In 2023, a ballot measure in Pella, Iowa, would have transferred authority over the public library from the board to the city; it was an attempt to give power to a handful of people who wanted to ban books in the collection by eliminating the group that insisted the library follow its own policies. Voters showed up and made it clear they did not want to do this, despite an incredibly well-funded campaign trying to sway their votes otherwise.

The ramifications of this bill are huge, and, like in Idaho, following the passage of their draconian House Bill 710, it would force many public libraries in the state to become adults-only.

HB 2622 was drafted in mid-February. As of writing, it’s sitting on a committee calendar and has not died after the first major deadline for bills.

Iowa: Senate Bill 2177

In the first roundup of bad bills, I wrote about a bill in Ohio that would require vendors of digital library materials to certify they had no inappropriate content. SB 2177, written by a notorious anti-library politician, would require something similar in Iowa. The bill would not allow libraries to provide databases or digital collections if the vendor did not provide a means to block content deemed inappropriate. This included not just whatever pornography the GOP believes exists for young people (none, to be clear). It would apply to information about “controlled substances,” as well. Good luck to any student trying to write a report using verified, factual information.

The good news is that this bill did not proceed past the state's first legislative deadline. That doesn’t mean we won’t see it resurrected again.

Iowa: Senate File 2119

Like numerous other states, Iowa wants to criminalize librarians by removing obscenity protections.

This one has died and will not be moving forward.

Iowa: House Bill 2324

This bill is the result of conspiracy-brained politicians who saw what is an amazing collaboration between the Des Moines Public Schools and Des Moines Public Library–opening up access to materials for young people who may otherwise never have it–and labeled it a loophole for evading the law. It would outlaw collaborations between public libraries and public schools. This includes denying public schools the opportunity to have the public library bring a bookmobile to school grounds.

HB 2324 is still on deck for the year, and legislators claim they’re going to address some of the issues brought up from those who have balked at such an overreaching bill (the GOP regularly says they’re the party of small government, but by that they mean so small they’re everywhere). We’ll see if that happens. This is just a downright mean bill.

Iowa: House Bill 2136

This is a standalone bill that would strip children of privacy rights regarding library records. We saw this incorporated into HB 2622, but it’s here, too. The more places politicians can put something, the more opportunities they have to get it passed somehow.

Not only do kids have the right to have the same privacy protections over their library records that adults do–there are many ways to tackle the actual issues that arise in libraries here, such as what happens if a minor has overdue items that aren’t about giving full access to their records–but this is also the start of a slippery slope where library records for all users are no longer private.

Non-library folks may not know this, but the right to privacy is both foundational in the Library Bill of Rights, and this practice of borrowing record privacy came in response to the Patriot Act.

This bill is sitting in a subcommittee.

Iowa: House Bill 826

This is also a criminalization bill targeting librarians. It would charge those who provide “obscene material” to minors with a criminal misdemeanor the first time, then a felony in subsequent times. There’d be a hefty fine, too.

There’s a carveout in this bill that notes it does not apply to materials used for “educational purposes” in schools and libraries. Such vagueness is the open door to the state deciding what does and does not constitute “educational purpose”–i.e., don’t expect this exemption to include books sitting on library shelves. They’re talking pre-approved (by them!) curriculum.

No obscene material is available in the library, and that goes twice as hard for such material in the library for minors. It’s a bill looking for a problem that does not exist.

The House subcommittee reviewing this bill has recommended its passage as of March 4.

Missouri: Senate Bill 1280

Missouri’s bill would require parents have full access to “electronic database[s], application[s], or website[s] that [list] or [provide] resources or materials, including, but not limited to, books, electronic books, periodicals, and multimedia content, including, but not limited to, images, audio, and videos.” Every public and character school district would be required to have someone in charge of “excluding from the digital library catalog any resource or material that is "explicit sexual material" or "pornographic for minors.” This person wouldn’t be allowed anonymity, either — their identity and place of work would be made available upon request.

Like the bill in Idaho, where parents are allowed to sue librarians for making available materials they deem inappropriate to minors, SB 1280 would allow any parent in a district to sue “for intentionally or negligently violating the act.”

As it applies to public libraries, SB 1280 would require that any computer in a public library have software installed that restricts materials for minors deemed "pornographic for minors or explicit sexual material". We don’t need to imagine what this looks like. Anything the right considers “inappropriate,” including puberty books and books on so-called “gender ideology,” would be lumped under these categories.

The most recent action on this bill was its hearing before the Senate Education Committee on March 3.

New Hampshire: House Bill 1214

You’ll notice a trend in several bills here: the state government wants to allow local government to take control of public libraries by changing the role of the library board. That’s what this bill would do.

There’s some good news, though. This bill was heard in early March by a House committee that killed it.

New Hampshire: Senate Bill 434

Republicans in New Hampshire want parents to be able to challenge literally anything available to students in public schools. This bill doesn’t apply to library books or classroom books. It applies to art, displays, textbooks, flags–really and truly anything that would fit the bill of “inappropriate,” “offensive,” or “age-inappropriate” for minors.

A single parent would have the power to remove anything they wish from all students in a school. The bill gives unprecedented power to radical agendas and partisanship. (Also, as should be pointed out, it’s another convenient way the right can promote a pro-voucher scheme because wow, what a pain to deal with this kind of stuff in public schools–no such laws apply to private ones.)

EveryLibrary has a great overview of the implications of this bill.

SB 434 has passed the Senate and is currently in the House Education, Policy, and Administration committee. It may be in there as late as mid-May.

New Mexico–Right to Read Bills

Three freedom-to-read bills were up for discussion in New Mexico this year. Unfortunately, none of the bills made their way into the legislative session–this is the third attempt to pass a bill like this and, unfortunately, the third no-go.

Take some time to read Kit Rosewater’s thoughts on the efforts.

Ohio: House Bill 583

Where Missouri’s digital materials censorship bill forces schools to become censors, Ohio’s bill would put the onus on vendors to censor any materials deemed “obscene” or “harmful to minors” before they could be used. Database providers who fail to comply will risk losing their contracts and may be required to reimburse school districts.

There’s been no further action on this bill since I covered it earlier this year. Perhaps this one will disappear through inaction. Perhaps it will continue to inspire more digital censorship bills.

Oklahoma: Senate Bill 2091

Another trend you might notice among the bad and ugly bills this year is the state’s determination to strip library boards of their power (see: Alabama, Indiana, Iowa, New Hampshire). This bill most resembles the one in Alabama, in that it makes clear the library board serves “at the pleasure” of the local government it serves. Boards serve their community users, not their government, but this bill purposefully changes that.

Board members who don’t bow to government officials would be removed from their roles. The bill goes one step further, too: it notes that the State Library Board serves at the pleasure of the state governor, who can remove members at any time for any reason.

This bill has been slow-moving through Oklahoma’s Senate. It’s in the Local and County Government committee as of early February, but bills like this aren’t going to disappear. When authoritarians want power, they’re going to legislate it. The losers here are, of course, the communities and taxpayers served by local libraries. They’re not local libraries if they’re at the whims of county and state government.

Oklahoma: Senate Bill 1250

An Oklahoma bill that has been making rapid advancement is this one, which would ban materials containing “sexual conduct, nudity, or obscene material considered harmful to minor-aged students” from public schools. Again and always, no such things exist, but the state’s republicans need to continue to myth to justify their perverted thinking about minors.

The legislators backing this bill do not care that it would impact access to things like the Bible for students, even if they say that the way the bill is written, such religious texts would be exempt (no, they wouldn’t, actually). They do not care that schools already have processes to facilitate collection management. They want to ram a bill through.

Schools would only have until October of this year to comply, too. That means they’d be forced to shut down school libraries to meet the bill’s demands and/or work unpaid through the summer to do so. Certainly, no new books would be purchased through the process, as staff would not have time to do anything else.

Deeply concerning during arguments about this bill? That more than one legislator recommended burning books they do not like. They are literally so offended by books that help young people understand what’s happening to their own bodies during puberty that they’d rather burn them.

If ever you wondered why an Epstein class of pedophiles exists, wonder no more. Denying young people the right to even learn about their bodies or about the ways other people might take advantage of their bodies allows for harm to be perpetuated by adults.

SB 1250 passed through the Senate and is now sitting in the House. The first reading was on Thursday, March 12.

Oklahoma: Senate Bill 1495

This is an “Age Appropriate Materials” bill that would ban certain types of books from public schools. There has not been much action on it because Republicans like how much more damage they can do with SB 1250.

Oklahoma: House Bill 2978

Again, thinking about themes in bad library bills, one that’s become clear in 2026 is the desire to undermine the Miller Test. We’ve seen anti-Miller Test legislation in Florida and Idaho. Oklahoma is itching to pass one, too, with HB 2978.

What makes Oklahoma’s bill especially worrisome is that it completely redefines one of the prongs of the Miller Test. No longer can community standards be used as an evaluation tool for obscenity. Why? Because legislators believe that community standards should not include “depictions” or “descriptions” of “sexually explicit conduct.”

If you’re scratching your head, you’re not alone. The bill does note that “sexually explicit conduct” is defined in Oklahoma’s State Statute 1024.1. But that, too, is pretty much wide open to interpretation–and it’s meant to be a circular web of no answers or guidance. To define obscenity is to use the Miller Test, but the Miller Test can’t be used to define obscenity in Oklahoma because it has erased a whole piece of the Test.

HB 2978 passed the House and is already making headway in passing the Senate.

Tennessee: Senate Bill 2319/House Bill 2449

This pair of bills, one filed in the Senate and one in the House, would expand book challenges to more people across a community. Anyone who resides within a county where there’s a library may file a challenge to remove or relocate a book. That even means people who don’t use the library, don’t have a library card, have never been to the library, and may not actually help fund the library.

It’s a bill that piggybacks on the Tennessee Secretary of State’s letter demanding book removals from public libraries, which went out late last year, and would help fuel bans by people who have zero actual interest or stake in the library.

Here’s how this might operate in practice: the Secretary of State sent out the above-linked letter, which notes that books depicting “gender” topics should be removed because of the President’s Executive Order on Gender. Executive Orders aren’t laws, so there’s no actual legal standing here for libraries to comply. This is but a partisan-based threat toward libraries. Whether or not libraries capitulate to the demands, this set of bills would encourage people to flood library inboxes with challenges to remove or relocate books on these topics–something that would put incredible time and financial constraints on the libraries. It would then render libraries so overwhelmed that they don’t provide the services they otherwise would, forcing them to shut down to meet demands, stop providing programming, and/or stop purchasing new materials to meet them. Then, as you might imagine, the complaints about libraries not meeting the community’s needs would emerge, encouraging questions about why tax money funds an institution that can’t keep up, and on and on we go.

The Senate’s bill has not made much progress since its introduction. The House’s bill, however, is on the State and Local Government committee's calendar for March 18.

West Virginia: Senate Bill 964

If you’re interested in your friendly neighborhood book banner having the power to label and rate materials in public libraries statewide, this bill is absolutely for you. Run through the state’s Department of Tourism (!!), this bill would require that all books in public libraries be subject to a ratings system devised by the committee appointed for this role, and ensure that libraries have only age-appropriate materials available.

Talk about a bill that undermines professionalism and librarianship.

The person who’d appoint the book-banning and rating committee would be the governor. What would the rating system look like? Who knows! But chances are it’ll just be easier for the committee to use something like Rated Books, right? Right.

This one’s been sitting in the Senate Government Organization committee since mid-February.

West Virginia: Senate Bill 687

SB 687 bans obscene materials from public schools in West Virginia. Is it getting tiring to read over and over again that there are no obscene materials in these collections? Anyway, there is no such thing as obscene materials in public school libraries.

What this bill makes novel is setting an arbitrary boundary around schools. No obscene material can be available within 2500 feet of any West Virginia school. Hopefully, there’s no one living in a house within half a mile of a West Virginia public school who happens to have LGBTQ+ books in their home library. Would those need to be removed from the home and labeled by the Department of Tourism’s book-banning committee, in the event a public school student decides to stop at a random house to borrow a book?

This one’s been sitting in the Senate Judiciary Committee since its late January introduction.

West Virginia: Senate Bill 47

It’s been a minute for an anti-drag show bill, but here’s a new one from West Virginia. It would ban drag shows from being performed in front of minors or in public places like schools or libraries.

For a while, it was possible to say that laws like this were deemed unconstitutional, per a court decision in Texas. But as of earlier this month, the Fifth Circuit–remember them?–said Texas can enforce its anti-drag show laws.

SB 47 has been sitting in the Senate Judiciary Committee since mid-January.

West Virginia: House Bill 4448/Senate Bill 183

Here’s your librarian criminalization bill for West Virginia. It removes obscenity protections from library workers and educators.

In both chambers of the legislature, this bill is sitting in its initial committee.

Wisconsin: Assembly Bill 961

Last in the extensive bad-and-ugly bills roundup is this one from Wisconsin. AB 961 is a labeling bill that would require “explicit content distributors to provide prominent, clear, and conspicuous warning labels on explicit content.” The warning labels would need to be large and conspicuous, noting that the materials are inappropriate for minors.

I don’t need to spell out what this does or how it’ll be applied, anywhere and everywhere that book banners want it to be applied. Here’s the catch, though: requiring vendors to label their own material has been deemed unconstitutional. We can thank the Texas READER Act lawsuit for that.

No explicit books are being sold to minors. There are no explicit or obscene books being promoted or made available to minors in public schools, libraries, or even your local or national bookstores. Publishing that would be illegal–but that doesn’t matter to those who are indoctrinated into the book-banning cult.

This bill was introduced in January and passed the Assembly in mid-February. The Senate had a public hearing about it on March 4.

The Good News on Several State Bills

We’ve made it through a lot of bad. Let’s talk about the good, which includes both a positive bill and the deaths of bills that would have been incredibly detrimental to libraries and access to literature.

Maryland: Senate Bill 535 / House Bill 586

I love this bill so much. It would require that county library boards have one student member, who would serve for one year. This gives young people a real voice in their local library, and in an era where their voices are continuing to be crushed, what a boon this would be.

The last action on this bill was a hearing in the House on March 4.

Utah: Loser Bills Come to an End

There were several anti-library and anti-literacy bills in Utah this year, but there’s some good news. Both Senate Bill 253 and House Bill 197 have failed. These two bills would have required even stricter oversight of school library materials, including the introduction of digital tools to “help” facilitate the process of banning books.

Back in January, I covered how such bills would be a boon for groups like Rated Books, whose National Book Rating Index would make for a perfect candidate to sell to the state as a “solution” to their problem. This bill would have also made a tool like OnShelf by BookmarkED more prominent throughout the state.

Both of these bills died in early March. That doesn’t mean we won’t see them show back up again in the future. But on-the-ground advocacy in Utah, as well as information shared at the national level, helped put the brakes on further unnecessary censorship in Utah.

They’re already busy enough banning books in 2026, despite a pending lawsuit about their state-sanctioned censorship.

These two back-to-back newsletters are not comprehensive. They cannot be. They, however, offer a broad look at what’s happening to libraries nationwide. Four key themes emerged several times: dismantling of library boards, dismantling of the Miller Test, continued efforts to push a narrative that school libraries house “inappropriate” material, and efforts to turn print censorship into digital censorship.

Bad and ugly legislation, whether or not it passes, does real, meaningful damage to our public goods and democratic institutions. There is a reason legislators file numerous bills, sometimes covering the same ground over and over. If we’re focused on killing one cockroach, we can miss another one skulking around. The zone’s flooded, and advocates are beyond their breaking points.

It’s been a long, hard, exhausting five years, and that’s not to account for anything outside of the library or book censorship world.

I keep coming back to something one of my yoga teachers reminded me of recently. It’s our job to tend to the part of the garden that we can reach. We don’t need to do it all, and we cannot do it all. We do what we can, where we can.

Take that message forward. Do what you can where you can.

Because of the size and effort put into these two newsletters, it may be a few weeks before you receive another edition of Well Sourced. Know if there’s silence for a period of time, that’s refilling the well–a practice that I acknowledge I’m not great at doing and yet need to model if I’m going to be saying that other people need to do it. This newsletter will not go away nor disappear. It may just take a few weeks’ vacation. I need to tend to my own garden, literally and metaphorically.

Notes:

*Also worth addressing for Iowa is that there was also a significant number of bills specifically addressing public education. The proposed legislation–much of which is still at play this session–grew in specificity as more bills emerged. These bills are not what they’re purported to be about, though. They’re about creating as many roadblocks in public education as possible so they can continue to point to vouchers and private/home schooling as a solution to the manufactured crisis. These bills work to steal public funds from public institutions and funnel it to the wealthy.