BALTIMORE — New Maryland laws aimed at limiting book bans, expanding affordable housing opportunities and preventing burdensome local rules on where cannabis dispensaries can open became official Thursday with Gov. Wes Moore’s signature.

Going into effect immediately was the Freedom to Read Act — a response to a rise in challenges to books in schools and public libraries, including dozens in Carroll County schools, that primarily tell the stories of LGBTQ+ youth or that deal with race. The law sets standards for content in libraries for the first time and makes Maryland one of the few states to enact such legislation for a trend seen nationwide.

“This is huge,” Del. Dana Jones, an Anne Arundel County Democrat who sponsored the bill, said in an interview Thursday. “As a lifelong reader and lover of libraries, I know it was important to me to see myself reflected in literature as a little girl growing up in Maryland. But the sigh of relief as a mother, that I know that anyone can go to a library and see themselves reflected in literature, is honestly an overwhelming feeling of pride to be a Marylander today.”

The law prohibits school and public libraries from excluding material solely because of the author’s origin, background or views, or for partisan, ideological or religious reasons.

Proponents have acknowledged some books could still be successfully challenged, including those removed for containing sexual content. That’s been the stated reason for book removals in Carroll County, where the board of education has also enacted a policy against “sexually explicit” content, which it defines as “unambiguously describing, depicting, showing, or writing about sex or sex acts in a detailed or graphic manner.”

The law also requires each school library system to have a uniform process for challenging material, for the material to remain available during the review and for that process to have a “reasonable timeline.” Those provisions angered Republican opponents who said during legislative debates that challenged material should be removed and a set timeline should be enacted to ensure a speedy review.

Ultimately passed mostly along party lines, the legislation was a top priority for Democratic House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones and part of her 2024 “decency agenda” that was signed into law in its entirety Thursday.

Jones, of Baltimore County, said the Freedom to Read law is intended to “ensure that we are exposing students to diverse viewpoints in a thoughtful and respectful way” at a time when “anger and hate” have resurfaced in political discourse.

“We’ve seen a rise of hate-based incidents in our classroom as curriculum debates and cultural wars have begun to overwhelm the school systems,” Jones said.

Other pieces of that agenda included new laws intended to limit election misinformation and disinformation, establish an anti-bias training program for school employees and fix what proponents said was a loophole in worker protection laws.

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