West Virginia GOP Passes Deranged Bill That Could Put Librarians in Jail

The Republican-controlled West Virginia House of Delegates has passed a bill that could see librarians facing jail time.

House Bill 4654 passed the chamber Friday by a vote of 85–12, along party lines. The bill would remove criminal exemptions for schools, public libraries, and museums that distribute or display “obscene matter” to a minor, even if the minor’s parent or guardian is present. Any employees of those institutions found guilty of giving minors obscene matter can face fines of up to $25,000, up to five years in prison, or both.

The incredibly short piece of legislation gives no indication of how the new rules would affect paintings or sculptures that feature nude figures, or books that include descriptions or definitions of sexual conduct. Obscenity laws are incredibly hard to enforce, because definitions of obscenity still largely come down to individual interpretation.

As a result, there will likely be more reports of obscenity, made by people who are either more conservative or just nervous about accidentally breaking the law. And since libraries and public schools often operate on very tight budgets, they are unlikely to have the budget to fight a surge in lawsuits.

“It is going to cost our counties and our librarians when these matters go to the court system,” House Minority Leader Sean Hornbuckle told The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. “Because this is still vague, I’m scared.”

“This is a very dangerous bill.”

House Minority Whip Shawn Fluharty warned that the legislation could inspire many lawsuits over books that staff members don’t even realize are problematic. “The librarians on staff might not know if a book has obscene matter in it or may or may not have shown it to someone, but because it was in the facility and it was sitting on a shelf, it could still be prosecuted,” he said.

The bill has now been sent to the state Senate, which the GOP also controls (along with the governor’s office).

Republicans across the country have increasingly sought to ban books, claiming they are protecting minors from seeing inappropriately sexual content. But most of the books being pulled from shelves tend to discuss race, gender, and sexuality.

Seemingly innocuous texts have also gotten caught up in the fray. School districts in Florida have pulled the dictionary from library shelves for including definitions of sexual conduct and have drawn over children’s picture books.

Nobody likes Representative Matt Gaetz, and he wants everyone to know it!

The Florida Republican took to social media to snag credit for the recent GOP exodus from Congress, bragging about how much his own party hates him.

“I love this @cnn article. The fundamental premise is that I’ve made congress so miserable for so many members that they are leaving. Wonderful!” Gaetz wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, sharing a CNN article that only mentioned him twice.

“We can’t save America with the current Republican team. We have to get tougher and smarter. We need newer, bolder voices in the House,” he continued. “If you want to be a Paul Ryan/Kevin McCarthy Republican—THEY DON’T WORK HERE ANYMORE!”

“The next phase of our plan is to REPLACE the droves of retiring members with America First Patriots,” he added, urging Republican primary voters to “do their part” and send him “more backup.”

So far, 45 representatives in both parties have announced their retirements, with an additional six expected to be replaced before the general election (seven if you include George Santos’s replacement just last week).

That includes several legacy Republican policymakers, including Representatives Kevin McCarthy, Bill Johnson, Ken Buck, and Debbie Lesko, who are hanging up their hats and resigning early in a bid to escape seemingly endless grandstanding, gridlock, and complete dysfunction from House Republicans.

The beef between the Republican establishment and Gaetz hit an apex in October, when the MAGA lawmaker led a coup, dubbed the “Gaetz Eight,” to strip McCarthy of the gavel over a renewed House Ethics Committee probe into Gaetz’s alleged payments to a minor for sex.

“It’s unfortunate because you think of the brain trust you are losing. I blame a lot of the ‘crazy eights’ led by Gaetz. They want to make this place dysfunctional to try to wear people out,” McCarthy told reporters outside the Capitol. “It’s very sad.… It makes it more difficult for getting people to run in the current climate.”

Donald Trump decided to weigh in on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s mysterious death, taking to Truth Social to memorialize … himself?

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday, three days after Navalny’s death was first reported. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”

Somehow, in his chaos of word vomit, Trump omitted a key figure at the center of the Russian political dissenter’s curious disappearance: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

After Tucker Carlson’s paltry Putin interview, Trump’s comments are yet another example of a startling shift for far-right members of the conservative party, which somehow straddles the razor wire between condemning former leaders of the Soviet Union while kowtowing to the proto-dictatorship that exists under Putin in modern Russia.

Hours later, Trump continued to make the moment about himself, deriding the nearly $355 million judgment he received on Friday for committing real estate–related bank fraud in New York.

“ALL POLITICAL PROSECUTIONS OF YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT, ME, MUST STOP IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote. “THIS IS ELECTION INTERFERENCE, AND MUST BE IMMEDIATELY STOPPED. I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO GO THROUGH ANY FAKE PROSECUTIONS BEFORE THE ELECTION. THIS IS COMMUNISM, AND A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. OUR COUNTRY WILL NOT STAND FOR IT. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

In another post, Trump likened the ruling—which he has just 30 days to come up with the money to appeal—to a “Stalinist nightmare.”

Representative Lauren Boebert is struggling to gain traction in her new district’s primary election, as nearly every Republican voter and lawmaker seems to loathe her intensely.

Boebert, who currently represents Colorado’s 3rd district, announced in December that she would run for election in the 4th district in 2024, instead. But if she expected to cruise to victory in the Republican stronghold, then she couldn’t have been more wrong.

At a recent event in Elbert County, southeast of Denver, Republican voters were deeply skeptical of Boebert’s candidacy, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. While some people said they still supported Boebert, others said they had grown tired of all the drama she courts.

“I don’t appreciate, as a Christian, people saying they’re Christian to get your vote and then turning out to be a lowlife, and now I just kind of think of her as a lowlife,” Judy Scofield, a retired university employee, told the Journal.

Many people highlighted the fact that Boebert had switched districts, making them trust her less.

“On Facebook, she’s not been well received by Republicans,” said GOP voter Tammi Flemming. “It’s the shenanigans and the drama and moving districts.”

Retired medical contractor Chris Ware was more blunt: “I will not vote for her. Period. She’s not one of us,” he said.

Boebert decided to switch districts after she was reelected in 2022 by such a narrow margin that the election nearly went to a recount. Her public image has taken a massive battering in recent months, as well, after she and a date received national backlash when they were caught on security cameras talking, using their phones, vaping, and groping each other while seeing a performance of Beetlejuice.

Her fellow primary competitors have continually accused her of carpetbagging, and the Elbert County event was no different. “You don’t need someone who’s going to go from district to district because they can’t win,” Weld County Councilman Trent Leisy told the crowd.

Boebert comes to the 11-person race with $1.3 million in campaign funds and plenty of name recognition, which could help her stand out from the crowd. But that fame has yet to help her out. During the first primary debate in January, Boebert ranked fifth out of eight candidates in an informal straw poll. While on stage, none of her opponents said they would support her if they ended up dropping out.

“The idea that because [the district is] a Republican stronghold, that they’re going to nominate a fringe conservative like a Boebert in the primary is a wrong notion—this thing is a horse race,” Republican strategist Josh Penry told the Journal.

A new ruling out of Alabama may spell the beginning of the end of the third-party fertility industry—and its reasoning partially relies on a verse from the Bible.

On Friday, the Alabama Supreme Court decided that embryos created through in-vitro fertilization would be protected under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, effectively classifying single-celled, fertilized eggs as children. 

The case, known as LePage v. Mobile Infirmary Clinic, Inc, rested upon an argument by several intended parents that their “embryonic children” had been victims of a wrongful death when an intruder broke into the IVF clinic, dropping trays containing some of the embryos and ultimately destroying them.

In a 7–2 decision, Alabama’s highest court ruled that the clinic had been negligent, allowing the parents to proceed with a wrongful death lawsuit. The court also ruled that it is “the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life,” referring to the Alabama Constitution’s Sanctity of Life Amendment, ratified in 2018.

“Here, the text of the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act is sweeping and unqualified,” wrote Alabama Supreme Court Associate Justice Jay Mitchell in the majority’s opinion. “It applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation. It is not the role of this Court to craft a new limitation based on our own view of what is or is not wise public policy. That is especially true where, as here, the People of this State have adopted a Constitutional amendment directly aimed at stopping courts from excluding ‘unborn life’ from legal protection.”

But the opinion also quotes the Bible as reasoning for functionally killing IVF access within the aggressively pro-life state, turning to an eyebrow-raising verse from Jeremiah 1:5 for guidance before deciding to make it harder for Alabamans to have a family.

“We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness. It is as if the People of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, Before you were born I sanctified you.’ Jeremiah 1:5 (NKJV 1982),” the opinion read.

It’s a devastating hit to the third-party fertility industry, which is comprised of large networks of agencies, clinics, and egg banks around the nation.

“Alabama’s Supreme Court ruling is a terrifying development for the 1 in 6 people impacted by infertility who need in-vitro fertilization to build their families,” said Barb Collura, president and CEO of Resolve: The National Infertility Association. “This anti-family ruling will likely have devastating consequences, including impacting the standard of care provided by the state’s five fertility clinics. This new legal framework may make it impossible to offer services like IVF, a standard medical treatment for infertility. It also remains unclear what this decision means for families who currently have embryos stored at these clinics.”

This article has been updated.