August 14, 2025, 10:51am

A Granite State minor’s library borrowing records used to be confidential, even to parents, but a recent New Hampshire state law has upended that privacy. Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, signed House Bill 273 on August 1st, which opens a kid’s library records to a parent or legal guardian. It’s a pretty brief bill:

All library records related to a minor’s current borrowing of printed library materials and audio-visual materials, such as DVDs and CDs, shall be available to either parent or the legal guardian of the minor when requested by either parent or the legal guardian of the minor, or the parent or legal guardian of the minor whose address matches that on the library account or who is listed on the library account.

The law will take effect next year. Critics are concerned that it’s not only a breach of privacy, but that the law is written too broadly, without a good enough system to verify that someone is actually a parent.

In the past, New Hampshire’s governor has been remarkably sensible for a Republican who endorsed Trump as recently as 2024. This new law comes right after she vetoed a number of far right efforts, including a book banning bill, an anti-trans bathroom bill, an anti-vaccination bill, and an anti-abortion “sex education” bill.

Is this new law another moderating move by Ayotte? It’s unclear to me how this new parental access will shake out. Hopefully kids’ transparent borrowing histories won’t be much use to the GOP and their homophobes and transphobes, but granting them even a grasping, theoretical win feels bad.

I was surprised to find out that parents couldn’t already access their kids’ records. It seems like it would be an existing parental prerogative. Which is to say that in the abstract, letting parents see what their kids are checking out of the library doesn’t seem obviously unreasonable to me. And crucially, this is only about records of what is checked out, so kids still have the privacy to look at books in the library.

But right now, it’s hard to feel comfortable with any law that takes away privacy and gives more parents control, especially in libraries. I can easily imagine scenarios where a kid will be less safe if there parent finds out what they’re reading.

This new law reminds of the SCOTUS decision against nationwide injunctions, which was perhaps the right decision in the bloodless abstract–these injunctions have been used by the court-shopping right to harass progressive efforts like the implementation of Obamacare and student loan relief–but the removal of this tool now is only going to supercharge an aggressive, fascistic American right.

These kinds of high-minded decisions are just too abstract when terrible things are happening so fast. There’s a quixotic gallantry to appealing to a saner conservative and looking ahead to a post-Trump American politics. But it’s sacrificing safety right now, and it’s all too easy to imagine real harm coming from this New Hampshire law.

If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the right will find ways to use the available tools to to reimpose their preferred hierarchies: certain types of people ought to lord over others, and anything that upsets that order is definitionally incorrect.

Is this New Hampshire law the worst case? Not by a long shot, but by not allowing children a basic level of privacy, we’re reinforcing adults’ dominion over children. Allowing kids more freedom will probably require deeper societal changes made in solidarity with children, but I have some hope for a world that allows kids more agency.

I’m not saying six-year-olds should be allowed to drive SUVs—no one should be allowed to drive SUVs—but kids should be afforded the trust and autonomy to read what they want in a public library.