Alabama board to continue withholding funds over ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ other books

The Alabama Public Library Service on Thursday said that Fairhope Public Library remains out of compliance with the administrative code and will continue to withhold state aid until the library is back in compliance.

The library must remove at least 10 books from a section for teenagers that the Fairhope Library Board voted to keep there, including “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood; “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky.

“This is the right decision,” said John Wahl, chair of the Alabama Public Library Service and the Alabama Republican Party.

The move drew criticism from board member Ronald Snider, who has been critical of the library board’s increasingly restrictive policies.

“You are becoming the censor-in-chief of Alabama,” Snider said to Wahl. “You are substituting your judgment over the overall benefit of many of these books.”

The board, which last year delayed restoration of Fairhope’s money in order to review the books, declared all 10 sexually explicit in violation of recent amendments to the state library code. Several board members based their votes entirely on a report from Wahl about the books, which first tallied the frequency of specific curse words, racial slurs and sexual words contained within the books.

Wahl then excerpted passages from the titles, and within each of them, highlighted specific sections that he said contained sexually explicit content that violates the the board’s administrative code, such as an intimate scene in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky and three passages in “The Handmaid’s Tale” describing sex.

“They contain parts that I would not want my child to read before I explain to them the content,” Wahl said. “I have that concern, and it is perfectly legitimate for parents across the state to also have that concern.”

Throughout the discussion, Wahl asked Fairhope to defend its decision to retain the books in the teens’ section of their library. Snider accused Wahl of ambushing Fairhope officials by not providing them a copy of the report ahead of time.

Randal Wright, chair of the Fairhope Public Library, told board members that the library does not allow minors access to sexually explicit materials without permission from their parents. The library has a system that allows parents to choose particular library cards for their children that allows them access to specific sections in the library, along with specific books that they may check out.

“As a whole, I did not think there was a reason that these books should be moved,” Wright said.

Wright said that it is also the parents’ responsibility to oversee the content that their children read.

“Parents make those decisions, and if you, as a parent, do not like this book, then your child doesn’t read,” Wright said. “But you can’t keep that book away from my child.”

Wahl disagreed, and that parents cannot watch their children at every moment they are in the library.

“If a mother comes in, she has two, three, maybe four kids, she cannot necessarily police every single one of her children on what they are looking at in a minor’s section,” Wahl said. “She cannot be expected to.”

The board will continue to withhold the first $11,000 allotment that Fairhope was supposed to receive in December, along with future quarterly payments it has been allocated for the current fiscal year. To regain its state aid, Fairhope must move the remaining 10 books that people said should be reshelved.

Board members first voted to suspend state aid for Fairhope in March 2025 after they fielded complaints from a few area residents who visited the library and complained that they found library materials in the teens’ section that violated an updated administrative code adopted in the summer of 2024 that required libraries adopt policies to restrict minors from having access to specific materials.

The board updated the administrative code in November to further restrict minors from having access to library materials that include “gender ideology,” which it did not define.

Fairhope library has received an outpouring of support and received $42,000 from two nonprofits from donations they solicited on their behalf to help offset the remaining funding that the library forfeited in 2025 because they continued to be out of compliance with the administrative code.

Read more at AlabamaReflector.com.