AL Lawmaker to Ban Pro-Gay Books

Good-bye Shakespeare, Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. If Alabama's state representative Gerald Allen gets his way, any school, university, or library that receives state money would be banned from carrying any work that promotes, mentions, or even alludes to homosexuality. Even teachers would be forbidden from mentioning or handing out materials that suggest homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle.

Allen filed his new censorship bill last month, and plans to introduce it to fellow lawmakers when Alabama's 2005 legislative session opens on February 1. Allen's previous bid to ban gay marriages in Alabama was defeated by the legislature.

"This is an embarrassment even by Alabama standards," says Mark Potok, director of the Montgomery, AL–based Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups. "This could even get the Bible banned, depending on how [the bill] was carried out."

And what should the state do with all of the books it collects? "I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," Allen recently told the Birmingham News.

But few believe the bill has any legs. "Not only is the bill unworkable, it is discriminatory and unconstitutional," says Carol Brey-Casiano, president of the American Library Association. "We trust that Alabama legislators will stand up to this latest attempt to censor our library collections."

Potok agrees that Allen may have had more than just censorship on his mind when he wrote the bill. "I think fundamentally this is a publicity stunt," he says. "But I also think he'd like to get this passed."