Idaho Republican lawmaker proposes reworking library book restriction law

BOISE (Idaho Capital Sun) — A Republican Idaho lawmaker on Friday proposed bills that would make significant changes to a law he pushed for two years ago that forced Idaho public and school libraries to move materials deemed harmful to children, or face lawsuits.

The Idaho House State Affairs Committee introduced two bills by Rep. Jaron Crane that would rewrite parts of House Bill 710, which the Legislature passed and Gov. Brad Little approved in 2024. 

The proposed changes in the new bill, House Bill 796, come after the state has faced two lawsuits over the library materials restriction bill — from a coalition of national book publishers, authors, the Donnelly Public Library and Idaho parents and students, and from private schools and libraries, which were also subject to the law. 

The bill’s statement of purpose said it is partly in response to an opinion by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which recently ruled in a lawsuit that private schools and libraries showed their argument that the bill’s “context clause” in its legal test was overly broad had a “likelihood of success,” Idaho Education News reported.  

Crane, a Nampa Republican who serves as the House’s majority caucus chair, told lawmakers that his bill tries to work feedback from the court into the law, including by defining a class of older minors and clarifying what materials should be deemed “harmful to minors.” 

The changes in the bill include:

• Overhauling the definition of what constitutes “sexual conduct.” The bill would remove language that declared any act of “homosexuality” as sexual conduct. (But the law doesn’t include “any act of heterosexuality,” or further define an act of homosexuality.) And it would add a list of carveouts for “nonerotic physical contact” that wouldn’t be considered sexual conduct, such as breastfeeding, childbearing, medical procedures and examinations.
• Adding a definition for “adolescent minor,” which would include minors age 13 to 17. The law currently treats all minors under age 18 the same. 

The bill also proposes changing the law’s legal test to evaluate whether content is “harmful to minors.” Idaho’s law uses a modified form of the Miller Test, an obscenity test established by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Instead of the content just appealing to “prurient interest,” the standard would be that the content would be evaluated holistically, with new language saying that the content “Taken as a whole, appeals” to “the prurient interest of adolescent minors ….” 

And the bill would add an exemption to materials that wouldn’t be considered harmful to minors, saying that “shall not include material that, when considered as a whole, possesses serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for adolescent minors.”

The bill’s statement of purpose says: “The proposed amendment recognizes that the State of Idaho has more latitude to select the content of educational materials in public schools and libraries than in private schools. In public schools and public libraries, the State of Idaho is exercising its own First Amendment rights through its selection of curriculum and library materials. Those choices constitute ‘government speech.’”

The Idaho Family Policy Center, a conservative Christian lobbying group, spearheaded the push for library legislation.