An Arkansas librarian can now be sentenced to a year in jail over a book on the wrong shelf. A bill before the U.S. Senate would make adults show a driver’s license to stream a movie. The Christian nationalists behind these moves wrote the plan to define pornography to cover both — and want the librarians registered as sex offenders.
Takeaways
- Arkansas librarians and booksellers now risk jail time under Act 372, and Section 5 gives local governments final say over what a public library keeps.
- The SCREEN Act uses the same “harmful to minors” trigger to force age checks — an ID or a face scan — across most of the internet nationwide, Netflix included.
- Project 2025 planned both fronts: its architects wrote the model state age-check bills, and its allied groups run the book-ban campaigns, with LGBTQ+ books as the first titles pulled.
In the Crawford County library in Van Buren, Arkansas, certain children’s books spent 21 months on a shelf of their own. The shelf came first, the law later. Residents brought complaints about the LGBTQ+ titles to the quorum court, the elected board that governs an Arkansas county, and over the winter of 2022-23, library director Deidre Grzymala moved the books out of the children’s area and into new “social sections.” Act 372 was still months from becoming law. Three mothers sued, and the county leaned on the statute anyway. U.S. District Judge P.K. Holmes III ruled the social sections unconstitutional on September 30, 2024. A day later, the books were back on the children’s shelves.
On July 30, 2026, a three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the permanent injunction that had kept the law’s teeth — Sections 1 and 5 — from ever taking effect. Section 1 makes “furnishing a harmful item to a minor” a Class A misdemeanor, carrying up to a year behind bars for librarians and booksellers. Section 5 hands city and county governments the last word on what stays in a public library’s collection.
Christian nationalists planned this punitive censorship years ago. On page five of Project 2025, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts demands that America outlaw pornography and that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” The plan’s foreword defines pornography so broadly that PEN America read it as a plan to treat LGBTQ+ content itself as obscene, and the librarians who shelve it as criminals. Three years on, the Christian nationalist movement is executing that page in Project 2025, with Arkansas taking the lead.
Not to be left behind, the oddly-named Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net Act — the SCREEN Act, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah’s bill to force any website carrying a single item “harmful to minors” to check ID at the door — would affect the entire internet nationwide. The two fronts advanced within a week of each other.
In July 2024, Russell Vought — the Christian nationalist and Project 2025 architect who now runs the Office of Management and Budget — bowed his head in prayer in a Washington hotel suite with two men he took for the relatives of a wealthy donor. One was a paid actor. The other worked for the Centre for Climate Reporting, a British journalism nonprofit, and their hidden cameras were rolling. “I actually never talk about our porn agenda,” Vought confided, then laid it out for the cameras. His Center for Renewing America had spent three years drafting model age-verification bills and pitching them to statehouses as a protection for children; in the recording, he described them as a backdoor — an early fight conservatives could win, one that sets up the next. Pornhub had already gone dark in Texas and other states that passed the bills. That, Vought said, was entirely the point. “We’d have a national ban on pornography if we could, right?” he told the reporters.
In Arkansas, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks, who issued the injunction, had warned where the law leads: bookstores and libraries walling off adults-only rooms, hundreds of titles inside, Romeo and Juliet and The Handmaid’s Tale among them. Writing for the panel, Trump appointee L. Steven Grasz was unmoved: “courts cannot conjure up their own hypotheticals,” and the plaintiffs hadn’t proved how much protected speech the law would smother. Chief Judge Steven Colloton observed that the libraries had supplied exactly that proof — lists of books they would have to sequester — but signed on anyway.
The text of Act 372, which Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed in March 2023, never defines what constitutes a harmful book. It is meticulous, though, about what counts as “furnishing.” Book Riot’s Kelly Jensen, a former librarian, noted that the definition sweeps in book displays and staff recommendations, even a title sitting untouched on a shelf — and that challenges can come from anyone, living anywhere. No Arkansas address required.
Attorney General Tim Griffin celebrated, casting the ruling as accountability for “public-library curation decisions.” Griffin joined other attorneys general in an Eleventh Circuit brief arguing Florida should be free to strip whatever books it wants from its public schools. John Adams, lead counsel for the 18 plaintiffs — among them the Fayetteville Public Library, Pearl’s Books, and Little Rock’s WordsWorth Books — had warned the appeals court in June that Section 5 works as “a kind of one-way ratchet”: a public hearing can pull a book from children’s reach, and nothing in the law puts it back.
Massachusetts is building the ratchet in reverse. One day after the Eighth Circuit ruled, the state legislature passed An Act Regarding Free Expression, which allows a challenged book’s removal only after a public hearing and a vote, and shields librarians from retaliation over the collections they build. In 2025, 33 Massachusetts public libraries reported formal challenges to their materials, more than the previous seven years combined. The bill sits on Gov. Maura Healey’s desk.
This has been a well-planned and extended battle for Christian nationalists. Moms for Liberty, a Project 2025 advisory board member claiming 130,000 members, runs book-ban campaigns as a war on pornography. “Books that don’t have pornography in them, let’s start there,” co-founder Tiffany Justice said when CBS News asked which books belong in schools. Hardly a grassroots coalition of concerned moms, the group saw co-founder Tina Descovich appear on the Rush Limbaugh Show within a week of its nonprofit approval in 2021, and the Heritage Foundation awarded it $25,000 through the Salvatori Prize. The U.S. Department of Education eliminated its book-ban coordinator position in January 2025 and labeled the issue “Biden’s book ban hoax.” In Congress, H.R. 7661 would allow a Heritage-linked Christian homeschooling website to decide what belongs in every public school library in the country.
The pressure lands on people, and in Crawford County in November 2022, it hit Arkansas librarian Deidre Grzymala, who set out a display of LGBTQ+ children’s books at the Van Buren library. A local physician and his wife wrote the county, demanding an end to “the agenda that is being pushed by the Van Buren Public Library.” Three library board members resigned; the county rebuilt the board with the campaign’s leader in the chair. By February, the new board had negotiated Grzymala out of her job — $40,687.50 in severance and a clause binding her and the county to say nothing disparaging about each other. Two years later, the board chair publicly blamed her for the lawsuit over the social sections. Grzymala is suing for defamation.
Patty Hector ran the Saline County, Arkansas, Library for seven years, the tail end of a 38-year career that started with a Dallas kid impatient for the driver’s license that would get her to the seven-story main library downtown. The Saline County Republican Women wanted books about race and LGBTQ+ lives out of the children’s collection. “This is where I draw the line,” Hector said. The Republican Women bought a billboard: “Director Hector must go.” “I would rather be fired for supporting the First Amendment than sued for violating it,” she said in August 2023, and when the library board refused to fire her, the quorum court passed an ordinance handing its power over library staff to County Judge Matt Brumley, who fired her in October. In February 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas sued the county over her firing.
In Washington, Utah’s Sen. Lee has pushed his bill since 2022, and it does more than borrow Act 372’s phrase, “harmful to minors.” 404 Media’s Samantha Cole reported that its mandate would pull in most sites built on user-generated content and would tie verification to each user’s internet address — cutting off the virtual private networks adults in age-check states rely on to sidestep the checkpoints. Heritage Action, the lobbying arm that works “with lawmakers to implement Heritage Foundation solutions,” anchors the roster of backers Lee’s office circulated.
He has company at the top of the Christian nationalist movement. House Speaker Mike Johnson described to a Louisiana church panel the Covenant Eyes accountability software running on his devices and his teenage son’s, each of them receiving a weekly report on the other’s browsing. “I’m proud to tell ya,” Johnson said, “my son has got a clean slate.”
Open Netflix under Lee’s bill, and one scene deep in the catalog, the app would ask for your driver’s license or a scan of your face before the show plays. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that the mandate reaches Netflix, Reddit, Discord, and Bluesky, and would force millions of adults to “give up their anonymity, privacy, and security” to see legal content. The bill’s text rules out the honor system — clicking an are-you-18 box “shall not be sufficient.” Roberts’s Project 2025 foreword has a sentence for the companies themselves: telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate pornography’s spread “should be shuttered.”
The Senate Commerce Committee voted 15-13 along party lines on August 5 to advance the SCREEN Act. The vote didn’t count. At least 10 senators never showed up, and the committee fell short of a quorum; the Kids Online Safety Act moved ahead that morning while Lee’s bill stayed put. None of it slows the states: 25 already make adults hand over an ID or a face scan to watch legal pornography, half the country as of November 2025.
Louisiana went first, in January 2023. Pornhub’s checkpoint there is LA Wallet, the state’s digital driver’s license app, whose system tells a third-party verification company that the visitor is at least 18 and the site loads.
Arkansas isn’t finished. The state Department of Education is weighing rules that would strip funding from libraries that let patrons 16 and under check out anything depicting sexual contact. The State Library Board — Sanders appointed all six members — takes up those rules August 14. The plaintiffs are considering appeals, up to the Supreme Court.
“Access to ideas and information is fundamental to a free society,” ACLU of Arkansas executive director Holly Dickson said after the ruling came down. In Van Buren, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding — a picture book about a child whose favorite uncle marries his boyfriend — sits back in the children’s section, for exactly as long as one judge’s order lasts. The quorum court that wanted it gone now holds final say over every book in the building. County officials enforced Act 372 three years before it was legal. Now it is. “Arrests and censorship,” Jensen wrote on August 3, “will not be hypothetical here.”
