As expected, the stacked APLS board voted to pull Fairhope’s funding despite previously finding them in compliance with the state administrative code. ALGOP Chair Wahl - who also splits his time as APLS board chair - accomplished what he wanted to achieve all along: humiliate a board and community that stood up to his extremist, anti-constitutional rhetoric.

Using the legally meaningless term “sexually explicit,” Wahl ambushed the Fairhope director and board chair with cherry-picked passages – stripped of context and purpose – in an attempt to justify overriding the judgment of a local board and trained professionals. The books targeted by Wahl include modern classics such as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Wahl even included The Hate U Give, a YA novel about racism, in his list of books to be banned from young adult sections across Alabama. He is broadening the scope of what is targeted, and now the board intends to make a list of banned books for Alabama’s public libraries.

Wahl doesn't understand a crucial tenet of constitutional librarianship - that content in books must be taken as a whole. Instead, he ambushed the Fairhope public library with a list of individual words, which will not pass muster in the Miller for Minors test nor meet the legal definition of obscenity. If he does not grasp those basics, he should not be making these decisions to override trained librarians and local boards.

Parents have always been in the driver’s seat of their children’s reading material, but Wahl has said that he believes the government should define what is inappropriate for children, and he did just that today, even though many of these books are on AP reading lists and have long been considered appropriate by most teachers and parents. Wahl is wrapping libraries in red tape and using cherry-picked passages and misleading language to advance his extremist ideological agenda.

Thankfully the people of Fairhope and Alabama at large have stepped up to protect Fairhope’s funding, and we will continue to fight for all Alabama libraries, which are being forced to choose between state funding and the constitutional rights of their patrons.

It’s a choice they shouldn’t have to make.