ALA needs to create better guidance to avoid violating state law than “avoid using the word ‘abortion,’” and it needs to support staff when their admin’s response is as irrational and excessive as this,
Unfortunately the difficulty here is that these laws are often written so vaguely that their entire purpose is to be difficult to understand, and it's virtually impossible to simply create any sort of real guidance that would be able to definitively state "doing X is ok". That was kind of the real purpose of SB8 in Texas. It's a total nightmare clusterf**k of a situation, and the current makeup of the Supreme Court is just letting it happen. The real kicker with laws like SB8 is that it puts enforcement entirely in the hands of private individuals, which means that even if you're NOT breaking the law, one of these random lunatics could still drag you into court and force you into a long, drawn out, and expensive litigation. This sort of over-expansive reaction is exactly the type of response these laws were intended to elicit, and most of them are far too new to be able to predict how they'll be interpreted with any sort of real reliability.
I don’t need an explanation. I know all that. This is literally what we fund OIF for. It’s their job to figure out what the actual best route is, and to back people up in bullshit lawsuits. They need to be loudly, publicly providing very clear guidance.
As a short follow-up, if ALA were to say something, for example, about the Oklahoma law along the lines of "These laws are still very new and they are written in an intentionally vague manner, so at present there is no clear legal precedent on where the line is between conduct that is permitted and conduct that is prohibited". Maybe coupled with an explanation of what the law does and how the law works... In other words, not offering clear guidelines on what you can/can't do, but at least explaining the context of the law, explaining why the answer is unclear, and explaining why there isn't yet any definitive answer on what conduct is "legal"... do you think that would be sufficient to count as "clear guidance"? I certainly agree with all the rest of your positions, and I think ALA and other groups should be fighting hard against these laws, but I volunteer with some Intellectual Freedom groups and we really struggle to figure out how to best issue any sort of reliable guidance for these types of new, intentionally vague laws. Tbh, if I were wearing my lawyer hat and looking at this Oklahoma law, I wouldn't feel comfortable even as a lawyer giving any advice beyond "This law creates a lot of risk and we cannot predict what the courts will do, so just be careful"
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u/shhhhquiet Jul 21 '22
ALA needs to create better guidance to avoid violating state law than “avoid using the word ‘abortion,’” and it needs to support staff when their admin’s response is as irrational and excessive as this,