Which libraries are currently under siege? (All of them, Katie)

Time for a quick recap of the right-wing War on Libraries, because the GOP doesn’t want kids (or anyone) to read, especially anything about sex, or LGBTQ+ people, or homosexual penguin lust, or how the human body does sexual things. Especially not if books make it sound interesting. (And even if they don’t.) Two stories from the trenches today:

We begin in Granbury, Texas, where a local chief inspector worked for two years trying to find some kind of crime to charge three school librarians with with, because God knows they were ruining children by having bad pornographic books in their libraries. Bad books by black authors too!

NBC News and its local affiliate NBC5 Dallas-Fort Worth used open records laws to obtain an 842-page dossier on the investigation of Officer Scott London, who — surprise! — is also affiliated with that crazy “constitutional sheriffs” movement. They’re the extremist anti-government militias that insist that sheriffs are the highest legal authority in the U.S., an idea that’s not actually in the Constitution, but that’s never stopped them. Dude also wanted start a local chapter of the Oath Keepers, Although NBC News does not make it clear whether that actually happened.

This is really one of those You have to read the whole thing Because they’re all deep-rooted, crazy stories, but here is a good overview video from NBC News/KXAS, including bodycam footage of London taking photos of library books and attempting to intimidate librarians and the school principal with threats of criminal charges over the books.

Constable London conducted a thorough investigation into the three librarians’ alleged crimes of “distributing harmful material” to minors, complete with summonses, searches of public records and – because you have to know who the “victims” were – obtaining the names of students who had borrowed dirty books, such as those by Toni Morrison. The bluest eye and others.

The investigation fizzled in June of this year when the local prosecutor, Hood County District Attorney Ryan Sinclair, declined to file charges, arguing there was insufficient evidence of a crime (and as the video and story show, even The Stupid Texas Law only applies to materials that have “absolutely no social value to minors”, which invokes the standby method Miller vs. California Supreme Court Test of what constitutes obscenity. (But again, given the current Court, Miller (can also be forgotten.)

The investigation was launched after two local Christian nationalist mothers, Monica Brown and Karen Lowery, became angry that the school board had not removed all the books on a list of “objectionable” titles and spoke about it at a Republican Club meeting. Lowery told reporters in an email last year that London approached them and asked if they wanted to file criminal charges, and by God, they did. They gave London a list of 11 books and passages they deemed “pornography” because they contained descriptions of sex or rape, and he went to work jailing several librarians.

He reported that he had purchased each of the 11 titles listed in Lowery and Brown’s police report and had read them in their entirety over the course of several months in 2022. His investigation file contained more than 120 photographs of passages he believed to be obscene, marked with a marker he had made.

Great use of two years of government police funding, and this time the attempt to throw librarians in jail was unsuccessful because a local DA actually paid attention to the law. Would be nice to have some better protection against censorship, huh?

In Idaho there are two private schools, a library group, a private public library, a church that operates a lending library, and several parents and teens are litigating in federal court to enforce the Idaho’s stupid new library censorship law, which requires libraries to move any material a citizen complains about to an “adults only” section of the library or risk a lawsuit. The stupid law, Bill 710came into effect on July 1 and has already has led to a small-town library banning unaccompanied children because the library building is too small to separate an adult section.

You’ll note that the lawsuit does not include any taxpayer-funded schools or libraries as plaintiffs; the complaint actually focuses on that fact in its claim that the law restricts the First Amendment rights of private entities over which the state should have no control. HB 710, the plaintiffs say,

restricts the ability of private K-12 schools and privately funded public libraries to provide minors (regardless of age) with books, art, films, and other materials that contain non-obscene content that is objectionable to the state of Idaho. By vaguely and overly broadly defining material that is “harmful to minors,” the law violates the First Amendment rights of such schools and libraries.

The lawsuit also accuses the state of violating the plaintiffs’ right to a fair trial as enshrined in the 14th Amendment.

The same constitutional arguments can be made when it comes to public institutions, but this lawsuit could be a nice wedge to get around any “purse power” justification for restricting content. And if it ends up with the entire law being found unconstitutional, so much the better. Smart!

The lawsuit alleges that the law’s “vague and overbroad definition of ‘harmful to minors’ violates decades of well-established constitutional law” and oversteps the state’s authority. It also violates the law’s vague and downright strange definition of what constitutes prohibited images or descriptions of “sexual conduct,” which includes “any act of … homosexuality,” which makes no distinction between explicit pornography and, say, a picture book that depicts two fully clothed fathers helping their third-grader with math homework at a kitchen table, albeit very gay.

The lawsuit aims to prevent the law from being enforced and declared unconstitutional.

So there you have it: Sanity is winning small victories in the culture wars, and we are fully convinced that Americans are good and tired of being bullied by right-wing creeps. This bullshit will not stand.

Part

A library in a small Idaho town has a solution to the new dirty book law: ban children

Idaho Republicans Make Third Attempt at Bill to Bankrupt Libraries

(NBC News / Courthouse News Service)

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