America, where you can join the Army at 17 but still not be allowed out of the library's children's section

The minimum age to join the U.S. armed forces is 17. If you're 17 and have a parent's permission, you can join the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines and be shipped off to an active war zone, kill or be killed, here's a hardhat to protect you from incoming missile strikes. If you don't have parental permission you'll have to wait until your 18th birthday, but 17 is the age when the Army considers you grown up enough decide whether what you're looking at, through the scope of your rifle, is an enemy terrorist meetup or another 17 year old's big wedding day.

So that's the number to keep in mind, as far-right lawmakers pass all their little laws criminalizing teenage book-learning. From the Arkansas Times:

[I]n Craighead County — symbolically, at least, Ground Zero for the state’s attack on libraries, thanks to Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Jonesboro) — the library announced several changes to circulation as it relates to minors. In a Facebook post, the library listed a number of changes to library policies, including:

• Minors are prohibited from using the self-checkout kiosks;
• Children under 13 years old may only check out materials from the designated children’s collection, while minors age 13-17 can only check out from the children or teen sections;
• Minors may not check out DVDs at all; and
• Minors are prohibited from entering or purchasing anything from the Friends of the Library Bookstore.

This is the fallout from the 8th Circuit's July decision upholding an Arkansas-passed state law allowing felony charges against librarians or other book havers who expose persons under 18 to "obscene materials." The law was one of a flurry passed by conservatives in numerous states in an effort to purge libraries (school and otherwise) of books deemed obscene, which turned out to mean any book anywhere that referenced the existence of same-sex couples or reproductive health.

Right-wing parents came out of the woodwork to insist that teachers and librarians be not just fired, but charged with sex crimes if their darling daughter came home with a Judy Blume book, Blume being one of the authors deemed by them to be a purveyor of smut. And each of the laws has intentionally been written to make the definition of "obscene" both all-encompassing and unknowable, so that the only possible way for librarians to ensure they wouldn't face jail time for providing Undesirable Books was to pack up entire sections or entire libraries.

When the definition of "obscene" depends on who happens to be in which political office during any given year, there's not much else that can be done. And that is why teens in Dipshit County, Arkansas are now allowed to join the Army before they're allowed to check out books about the Army.

Outstanding move, everybody. It's almost like our modern book-hating overlords want their constituents to grow up ignorant of the world around them, don't you think?

Honestly, it will almost be fascinating to watch this play out—if it weren't so flippantly doing damage to, you know, both a great many people and the fabric of American society in general. Imagine becoming a cadet at West Point or some other school and having to explain to your instructor that No Sir, I Don't Know Much About The Civil War. That Was In The Adult Section.

Imagine going off the college bookstore and being astounded at the mugs with pictures of authors on them, the posters you can just buy. Look, there's a poster with an Einstein quote on it, and you never once saw that before because until you got to be 18 you weren't allowed in the library's gift shop. You know, in case Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin suddenly decided that a picture of Einstein with his tongue sticking out was Too Sexy For Children.

For fks sake, everybody, can we stop barreling towards spiritual oblivion quite so quickly? Find a rest stop, pull over, catch a few z's before we all start debating whether Clifford The Big Red Dog is a metaphor for lesbianism or whatever th'f will be next.

The Attorney General mentioned there is a backer of the law, and celebrated the win by boasting it "allows Arkansas to move forward in enforcing a law that protects children from obscene materials while increasing accountability for public-library curation decisions."

And that warning, just on its own, tells you why counties think the only possible way to steer clear of an indictment from this man who objectively looks like a suit-wearing clitoris is to ban anyone in the law's range of "protection" from accessing any books at all.

Can you be perfectly certain, as a librarian, that none of those world history books mention anything that the most prudish and paranoid twit in Arkansas would consider obscene? Nothing untoward in those books on Greek history, or on Vikings? We're sure that this section over here has not a word about Ezra Pound? God help you if you allow the children access to rock and/or roll music. Science? Botany? Are you sure that the field guide to North American plants doesn't contain any Latin phrases that some would-be Arkansas influencer could interpret as secret sluttery?

Remember, this is the crowd that's banned books by Judy Blume. Parents have nearly gotten into fist fights over a book about gay penguins. Sexual health books, as in the books that let teen girls know that the bleeding they're experiencing does not, in fact, mean that they're about to die—those ones have regularly been the first pulled from the shelves.

Librarians are not overreacting. And crusaders like Griffin are simply lying, when they claim this wasn't the intent of the laws. Of course it was the intent of the laws. The intent is punishment. The intent is control. The intent is to hang a sword over the head of the supposed "indoctrinators" who, by exposing children to knowledge of the world around them, cause children to question their parents, their bosses, or the state.

There is always something that a conservative dipshit of ambition can claim to be deviant or indoctrinating. And there will always be deeply ignorant or gleefully manipulative maybe-predators who don't want any child learning more than they themselves know. The laws are written to allow that Dipshit of Ambition to sabotage whatever needs sabotaging, as easily and often as possible.

It is pointless to explain the structural flaws of these laws to their advocates. There has never been a time when society could agree on what "obscenity" meant, and never will be, and any law that weaponizes the ambiguity for the purposes of expanding censorship was meant to do that from the start. Nothing here is an "accident."

But we do have to marvel at what the would-be child protectors think the world should look like. These people seem to genuinely believe that you should be able to be shipped off to war before you're allowed to check out a book about war. They seem convinced that the problem with society is that some child might see a statue with breasts. There's outrage at the notion that teaching is a skilled profession worth paying for, but are eager to stuff each school with surveillance features so that well, if there's another mass shooting at least the networks will have some footage to share.

You can join the Army at 17, but you can't read detective novels. You can be stuffed onto an aircraft carrier, shipped out to see, and fed emergency rations when Your Fucking Betters forget how supply lines work, but you can't read Hemingway in Arkansas.

That's failed state nonsense right there. That's what they write history books about, a dozen centuries after the fact; here are the signs of decay that everyone ought to have seen coming, but it turned out that all those "everyones" had previously been executed by the state for seeing things coming, leaving only the gormless sludgebrains who couldn't.

Mostly, though; what a loss for precocious children of Arkansas and other states. To be stuck, until you graduate, only writing book reports on things that can be found in the children's section. Only being able to read things in the children's section, and not even all of them—only the things so banal that not one person in the state has bothered to challenge them.

Stuck forever behind everyone else, because they could read the books you weren't allowed to see.

Meanwhile, conservatives remain united around the actual, real-world sex predator who's gotten increasingly rabid in his insistence that the public never be shown the full Epstein Files. Go figure, and so forth.