SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California lawmakers recently voted down a bill requiring school boards to ban books with “harmful material” from libraries and classrooms, legislation that would have given parents the ability to sue those that did not comply.

The Senate Education Committee on Tuesday did not advance Senate Bill 1435 from Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh, R-Yucaipa. Bill opponents called it an “overreach in what the law is” and a “form of censorship.”

SB 1435 would apply to preschools, transitional kindergartens, kindergartens and grades one through eight. It would require school boards to ban books with content considered “harmful” under California Penal Code 313, which prohibits the material from being distributed to children.

During an exchange with Ochoa Bogh, Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, D-Los Angeles, said she does not “need the state’s guidance to tell me how I feel about what my children are doing.”

“I don’t need the state’s guidance to do that,” she said. “So that is why I’m opposing this bill.”

Penal Code 313 defines content as harmful if it “depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct and which, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.”

It would require school boards to adopt this standard for books and would allow parents, guardians and school district residents to sue in civil court “after the governing board of the school district’s refusal to remove any harmful matter requested of it,” according to the Education Committee staff report.

The discussion comes as California parents rights activists push school districts to adopt gender notification policies, which would require staff and teachers to inform parents about a change in a student’s name or gender pronoun. Some have also protested LGBTQ student clubs, saying schools were hiding them from parents.

Conservative states around the country have also recently passed laws penalizing school librarians for providing “harmful” books to students.

Ochoa Bogh and said the bill is necessary because “as this material becomes more readily available through social media, movies, books and other digital mediums the state Legislature has been slow to provide the necessary oversight.”

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