You are reading it wrong. In fact you're reading it so wrong that I don't see how you even get there. In fact I suspect that you are deliberately lying, in the hope of tricking people who don't have the time to go read it themselves.
What it does is to allow private civil suits for things that are presently only criminal. Yes, it applies that to employees as well as the businesses themselves, but that's minor. In fact the criminal statute probably already applies to employees. I didn't go look it up because it's not actually important anyway.
Allowing private actions has the following effects:
1. It allows any random whackjob to bring lawsuits, in a forum where the bookseller has to pay their own legal costs. There are no public defenders in civil suits. There are plenty of rich random whackjobs in Texas who'd be happy to bring losing cases, but keep the proceedings running until legal bills had bankrupted this or that bookstore. In legal harassment, whoever has the most money wins. Independent bookstores aren't rolling in money. It doesn't matter if you're in the right if you're forced into bankruptcy proving it.
And the real beauty of it is that it creates a climate of fear, so after the whackjobs have made a few examples of random bookstores, they won't have to keep on outspending people. Stores in general will just stay within whatever boundaries the whackjobs choose to set. Which may be well short of the actual legal boundaries.
2. It lowers the standard of proof from "beyond a reasonable doubt" to "preponderance of the evidence". And the way the legal system interprets "preponderance" creates a far lower threshold than what a normal person would get out of the word. Basically it means that a 51 percent probability is enough. Especially bad because there's a quite significant chance that you can get a jury to see a 51 percent probability where the correct probability, based on a fair reading of the actual evidence, is way less.
3. It makes it hard to stop the legal harassment. If the state keeps bringing meritless cases, the state can be enjoined to stop. If random individuals keep bringing meritless cases, they have to be shut down one at a time. There's no standing to enjoin everybody from doing so. And the threshold to shut down even one of them is very high. And if whackjob A has been shut down, they can still fund whackjob B to go off and bring bullshit suits. This is an application of the Texas "deputize private citizens" hack that they invented for abortion. It may be less pernicious here, but it's still bad.
This is all explained at the top of the linked article. Did you not read that? It's also obvious to anybody with even a tiny bit of political or legal sophistication.
... and let's not forget that the whole underlying concept of "harm to minors" is straight up idiotic to begin with.
What it does is to allow private civil suits for things that are presently only criminal. Yes, it applies that to employees as well as the businesses themselves, but that's minor. In fact the criminal statute probably already applies to employees. I didn't go look it up because it's not actually important anyway.
Allowing private actions has the following effects:
1. It allows any random whackjob to bring lawsuits, in a forum where the bookseller has to pay their own legal costs. There are no public defenders in civil suits. There are plenty of rich random whackjobs in Texas who'd be happy to bring losing cases, but keep the proceedings running until legal bills had bankrupted this or that bookstore. In legal harassment, whoever has the most money wins. Independent bookstores aren't rolling in money. It doesn't matter if you're in the right if you're forced into bankruptcy proving it.
And the real beauty of it is that it creates a climate of fear, so after the whackjobs have made a few examples of random bookstores, they won't have to keep on outspending people. Stores in general will just stay within whatever boundaries the whackjobs choose to set. Which may be well short of the actual legal boundaries.
2. It lowers the standard of proof from "beyond a reasonable doubt" to "preponderance of the evidence". And the way the legal system interprets "preponderance" creates a far lower threshold than what a normal person would get out of the word. Basically it means that a 51 percent probability is enough. Especially bad because there's a quite significant chance that you can get a jury to see a 51 percent probability where the correct probability, based on a fair reading of the actual evidence, is way less.
3. It makes it hard to stop the legal harassment. If the state keeps bringing meritless cases, the state can be enjoined to stop. If random individuals keep bringing meritless cases, they have to be shut down one at a time. There's no standing to enjoin everybody from doing so. And the threshold to shut down even one of them is very high. And if whackjob A has been shut down, they can still fund whackjob B to go off and bring bullshit suits. This is an application of the Texas "deputize private citizens" hack that they invented for abortion. It may be less pernicious here, but it's still bad.
This is all explained at the top of the linked article. Did you not read that? It's also obvious to anybody with even a tiny bit of political or legal sophistication.
... and let's not forget that the whole underlying concept of "harm to minors" is straight up idiotic to begin with.