Stupid people writing stupid laws
The more I try to edit their way out of this, the more obvious it becomes that they don't want their gibberish to make sense.
Can you make sense of this?
I can’t, but I’m going to try anyway.
This is a proposed amendment - intended by its proposers and sponsors to become law here in South Carolina.
I’m not being deliberately obtuse in expressing my confusion. This isn’t a question of pretending I do not see the typo, or that we all know what’s intended - not in any specific way where people acting in good faith would independently arrive at the same conclusion.
I’m trying to imagine what a qualifying certification statement would look like if this becomes law. It’s all good if we understand what the certification would look like and if all libraries seeking state funds could offer materially similar certifications. That little thought experiment is no help.
Here’s one entirely plausible certification that represents my best good faith effort:
”The Richland County Public Library hereby certifies that it does not offer any books or materials that appeal to the prurient interests of children under the age of 17 in its Children’s, Youth, or Young Adult sections. Books that do appeal to the prurient interests of such minor children that we do not offer in the foregoing sections of this library, are only made available [to those minor children] with explicit parental consent.”
Their drafting standard - for a statement on which nothing less than a library’s state funding is entirely dependent - is so shoddy that I’m not sure I’m even in the ballpark of their intent.
They could mean, for another variation, that those books are not available at all - on any shelves in any section - without explicit parental consent.
More literally - and still entirely plausible in this climate where Byzantine rules are designed to be so confounding that they stifle all attempts to do anything that would run afoul of the rule in its most preposterous form - this seems to force the people who would sign such certifications on behalf of libraries to assure the state treasurer that:
”a certain poorly-defined set of books are not available to young people but they are available with explicit parental consent…which implies that those books would first be available to the young people who seek them to solicit their parents’ consent to access them, putting us in violation of the first part of this certification, so just take me away in handcuffs now and lock me up for perjury.”
What is the penalty for the certification signer if some keyboard warrior in Colorado Springs - home of Focus on the Family - decides to report a book found in the library’s on-line catalog as “appealing to the prurient interests of children under the age of 17” in the eyes of the most frail, narrow-minded and pro-censorship prude who may not even reside in state?
Once the inevitable barrage of complaints get filed, who’s making that second-guessing determination of truthfulness after the certification has been made?
Can someone even make that certification in good faith when there’s no way to ever know who’s going to second-guess every resource in the children’s, youth and young adult sections? Or can they make their certification in full ignorance of how some unknown bureaucrat will come after them because of a disagreement over whether a depiction of same-sex parents in a book is pornographic? (Because there are too many smooth-brained folks in positions of power who totally believe that to not calculate that risk when signing the certification.)
This is where I need to remind you that these concerns flow from the version of this amendment that I’ve reconstituted from full-on gibberish into something that can be plugged into a sentence diagram.
I’m far from done.
What do they mean by “explicit parental consent” anyway?
I mean, sure, I am 100% certain that the written consent of anyone I’d be good friends with would definitely be laced with obscenities and crude toilet language in their effort to ensure their consent meets the regulatory standard of being sufficiently explicit. But a more reasonable - yet cock-eyed - interpretation of that clause would be to require parents to identify every book by its title, if not its 13-digit ISBN number. Will a librarian sign a certification if it accepts anything less than the most restrictive conceivable notion of what constitutes “explicit parental consent?”
Again, I’m not trying to get lost in this word salad just for kicks. These are questions that library systems across the state must be able to resolve, with statewide consistency, as a prerequisite to receiving state funding. These are material questions that must be resolved from the nonsense that these three clowns are proudly circulating among their constituents - as if they’ve channeled freaking Thomas Jefferson in penning their proposed amendment.
We get it, guys. You’re trying to tell people in your respective disticts that you hate the queers.
And that you’re willing to fuck with library budgets to deliver that message.
This is just one of many examples of asshats who cannot write their way out of a wet paper bag getting in over their heads by authoring laws that affect the residents of this state. This problem only gets worse because they’re often rushed to move their petty policies along at breakneck speed to beat the “crossover date” that bills have to pass on one side of the bicameral legislature to the other before they go off to die.
Then - with absolutely no sense of shame or cognizance of their substantial intellectual limitations - they are always the ones who are first to complain about government - as if somehow they and their full-chested, confident and proudly-declared expressions of illiteracy are not the problem.
This, friends, is how our laws get made.