On February 24, 2026—the same evening President Trump called for a national ban on gender ideology in schools during his State of the Union address—Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL-15) introduced H.R. 7661, the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.

The bill would prohibit federal funds from developing, hosting, or promoting any program, activity, or literature for children under 18 that contains sexually explicit material. Schools found in violation could lose federal funding.

Rep. Miller, who chairs the House Family Caucus, said:

“Parents deserve complete confidence that their tax dollars are being used to promote academic excellence—not to expose children to harmful and explicit material that undermines their innocence.”

The bill defines “sexually oriented material” as depictions of sexually explicit conduct under 18 U.S.C. §2256 and material related to gender dysphoria or transgenderism. It exempts standard science courses, major religious texts, classic literature, and classic art, aiming to prevent disputes by clarifying both what is included and excluded.

The bill has 17 co-sponsors. It is supported by groups including the Family Research Council, the Independent Women’s Forum, the American Principles Project, the Eagle Forum, the Family Policy Alliance, the Parental Rights Foundation, and Moms for America.

Miller introduced the bill after incidents in North Carolina, New York City, and California. In these places, schools used taxpayer money for sexually explicit programming or performances. She was also responding to explicit books in school libraries, like Gender Queer, All Boys Aren’t Blue, and Lawn Boy.

These books, sometimes recommended even to middle-schoolers, contain explicit sexual material.

Illinois played a central role in shaping the policies and debates that resulted in Miller’s bill.

When Alexi Giannoulias was sworn in as Illinois Secretary of State in January 2023, he also became the State Librarian, giving him direct control over the state’s library grant programs. He arrived with a well-defined agenda.

Within weeks of taking office, he had convinced friendly legislators to introduce House Bill 2789, which required compliance with the American Library Association‘s Library Bill of Rights as a condition of receiving state library funding. The bill cleared committee on March 8, passed the full House 66-39 in late March, sailed through the Senate 39-19 on May 3, and was signed into law by Governor Pritzker on June 12, 2023 — all within five months of Giannoulias taking the oath of office. It took effect January 1, 2024.

The speed of the legislation suggests a coordinated effort, not a grassroots response to local concern.

The idea for the bill started with a conflict in Downers Grove, where parents opposed the book Gender Queer in the school library. When members of the Proud Boys aligned themselves with the complaining parents, Giannoulias and his allies seized on that connection to portray the entire parent movement as extremist, a tactic that would become a template for dismissing parental objections nationwide.

HB 2789 made it Illinois policy to protect libraries from efforts to ban, remove, or restrict access to books and materials. The bill required libraries to either adopt the ALA’s Library Bill of Rights or craft their own written anti-book-banning policy. Only libraries that met this condition remained eligible for about $61 million in annual state grants, affecting roughly 1,600 public and school libraries.

The final tallies — 66-39 in the House, 39-19 in the Senate — make clear this was not a bipartisan child-protection measure. It was a straight party-line ideological vote, and every legislator who cast it was responsible for understanding what the ALA’s Library Bill of Rights would require in practice.

Giannoulias did not keep the experiment in Illinois. In September 2023, he testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, promoting the Illinois law as a national model. He also launched the banbookbans.com website to boost the campaign.

“We solved the problem in Illinois,” he told the committee.

“We fixed it.”

Giannoulias was unprepared for Sen. John Kennedy.

Kennedy confronted Giannoulias with the kind of material his bill protects. He read aloud passages from Gender Queer and All Boys Aren’t Blue—books supported by Giannoulias’ legislation. Parents opposed books like those read by Kennedy, not classic literary works such as those by Shakespeare, Harper Lee, Mark Twain, or the Bible.

Under Kennedy’s questioning, Giannoulias struggled to defend the implications of his position.

The ALA’s Library Bill of Rights, now embedded in Illinois law, contains language many lawmakers likely did not read closely. The ALA’s interpretation, called “Access to Library Resources and Services for Minors,” states that denying minors the same access as adults violates the Bill of Rights. The ALA opposes any restrictions based on a library user’s age.

In plain terms, the ALA believes kindergarteners and adults should have equal access to all library material, whereas Illinois law requires this approach to qualify for grants. Librarians who restrict children’s access to explicit material risk losing funding; Giannoulias supports this standard, while Miller’s bill seeks to change it.

Defenders of unrestricted access argue that minors have a First Amendment right to these materials. They also claim that age-based restrictions are unconstitutional. The ALA references Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011) for support.

That reading misrepresents what the Court actually held.

Brown focused on violent video games. Justice Scalia’s majority opinion distinguished the case from Ginsberg v. New York (1968), the leading precedent on explicit material for minors. Scalia explained that, because violent speech is not obscene, it was irrelevant that California’s law resembled the New York obscenity law upheld in Ginsberg. In short, Brown did not impact Ginsberg.

Ginsberg is clear. The Court held that states can restrict minors more than adults in choosing what sexual material they read or see. The ruling also said state power over children exceeds its power over adults.

Material legally permitted for adults can still be restricted for minors.

The ALA has known about this legal ruling for decades. Its public framing of the precedents is either seriously flawed or highly selective.

The clearest evidence is not case law alone, but the structure of the statutes themselves. Illinois and other states have created protections for teachers and librarians against obscenity-related liability. These protections would be unnecessary if existing law already made clear that no legal exposure existed. That does not by itself prove criminal guilt, but it does suggest lawmakers recognized real vulnerability in making sexually explicit material available to minors.

In that sense, Giannoulias’ bill was not simply a defense of access. It was a preemptive effort to insulate that access from challenge. Miller’s bill responds by trying to neutralize that framework and restore the principle that minors need not be given the same access as adults.

Federal law is also available but rarely used. 18 U.S.C. §1470 makes it a crime to knowingly send obscene material to anyone under 16 through interstate commerce. This could include electronic library systems. The larger obstacle appears to have been enforcement, not merely the absence of legal tools.

Legal context changed with the Supreme Court’s June 2025 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor.

A case in Montgomery County, Maryland, brought these issues to court. Schools there added LGBTQ-themed storybooks and removed the option for parents to opt out. Muslim, Roman Catholic, and Ukrainian Orthodox parents sued, saying the policy interfered with their right to guide their children’s religious upbringing. They won.

Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion. He stated that parents’ right to guide their children’s religious upbringing would be meaningless if it did not extend into the classroom. The Court applied strict scrutiny, the highest constitutional standard, to any policy that significantly limits this right.

That is important.

The Court now holds that parents have a constitutional right to prevent their children from being exposed to school content that conflicts with their beliefs. Schools are required to accommodate this right. A federal law linking funding to this principle would align with the clarified constitutional framework.

Regardless of Miller’s bill, Mahmoud also provides parents with tools now. Parents can request advance notice of materials that might conflict with their beliefs and can also ask for opt-outs. Failure to comply could raise constitutional issues.

However, legal principles are most applicable when viewed alongside students’ real-world experiences.

Consider Megan, whom I wrote about last December.

Megan was an innocent kindergartner who loved reading. By adolescence, she had developed an addiction to explicit romance novels and pornography, first encountered through school library recommendations and the direct encouragement of school librarians and teachers.

The material created a dopamine-driven cycle she could not break. It left her isolated, experiencing self-hatred, and exposed her to dangerous online relationships with adult predators. She became suicidal. She ended up in juvenile detention.

“You can’t unsee those words,” Megan said of the explicit content she encountered through school-sanctioned channels.

Her mother had her own history — as a child, she had been victimized by a predator who used pornography to normalize abuse, leaving lifelong scars. Now she watched her daughter travel a similar path, guided there not by criminals lurking outside the school gates, but by the institutional ideology of the ALA, faithfully implemented by the librarians and teachers who believed they were helping Megan find books she would enjoy.

It is difficult to imagine any responsible therapist recommending graphic sexual content to adolescents as a tool for healthy development. Exposure to traumatic sexual material can be deeply damaging. Nevertheless, the ALA claims that access to such material is a First Amendment right protected from parental intervention.

The annual Banned Books Week reinforces this perspective. For example, the 2025 theme — ‘Censorship Is So 1984. Read for Your Rights’ — compared parental objections to graphic sexual content in school libraries to censorship by totalitarian regimes. It is not a civil liberties campaign.

It is a propaganda operation designed to delegitimize parents before they can act.

The Stop the Sexualization of Children Act has been referred to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. GovTrack predicts it has little chance of passing as a standalone bill.

Critics on the left have already pointed out its biggest flaw: defining gender dysphoria and transgenderism as sexually oriented material. That wording invites litigation since merely including sexually oriented material does not meet either the Miller test or the Ginsberg standard. A more targeted bill based only on the existing Ginsberg standard would be more defensible and still cover books like Gender Queer and All Boys Aren’t Blue.

Some conservatives have a different concern: Republicans who usually support local control might now, if they back Miller’s bill, endorse a federal mandate on school curriculum. That inconsistency persists even if Miller’s bill is revised. Supporters of Miller’s bill argue that the federal government has long used education funding to shape school policy in ideologically loaded ways. This law would undo and neutralize the years-long ideological misuse of federal intervention.

Even so, the bill still has clear value. Messaging legislation often serves as a template for later enactment. Appropriations riders may be more likely to serve as the vehicles. And with the Department of Education itself under pressure, the fight could shift from Congress to executive enforcement.

For now, the bill has three main goals: to create a voting record, to force opponents to defend sexually explicit material in schools, and to show that Congress is ready to take action.

It is already advancing all three goals.

Parents, however, cannot wait for Congress.

First, find out what your children are reading. Don’t assume that school libraries always vet materials for age appropriateness. In some cases, the ideology behind library acquisitions appears to work in the opposite direction. The Follett database allows the public to search the collections of most public schools. Use it.

Second, consult watchdog organizations. RatedBooks.org provides content summaries, including page-specific details of concern. Spending a few minutes checking can prevent years of harm.

Third, invoke your rights under Mahmoud v. Taylor. Request curriculum and library information in writing. Demand notice. Document responses. If schools refuse, file complaints.

Fourth, engage local institutions. School boards, library boards, and village councils remain the main battleground. The strategic capture of these institutions did not happen by accident. Their resurgence must be just as deliberate.

The good news is that the legal landscape has changed. The Supreme Court ruling has restored ground that was steadily lost to parents. Parents who take advantage of this restoration will find that institutions that used to rely on parental passivity are less intimidating than they appear.

Rep. Miller’s bill is more than just a culture-war gesture. It is a legislative response to a systemic failure—one that Illinois helped create and spread.

Whether it passes in its current form matters less than the legal and political framework it helps establish, one that protects children from sexually explicit material promoted by the very institutions responsible for their care.

Ginsberg was never overturned. Mahmoud now uses a parental-rights standard enforced with strict scrutiny. Statutory obscenity exemptions can be challenged. Federal law already criminalizes transferring obscene material to minors.

The tools are in place. The remaining question is whether parents will use them.