Multiple lawsuits have erupted in recent years filed by plaintiffs who demand their local libraries provide them with pornographic material, or other titles that many find offensive.
They claim a constitutional right to have taxpayers provide such materials, but a decision from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has destroyed that argument.
To plaintiffs who wildly claim that, “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people,” the ruling said such “over-caffeinated arguments” should stop, and parties “take a deep breath … No one is banning (or burning) books.”
The solution is clear, the judges wrote in an opinion in the case Little v. Llano County: “If a disappointed patron can’t find a book in the library, he can order it online, buy it from a bookstore, or borrow it from a friend. All that Llano County has done here is what libraries have been doing for two centuries: decide which books they want in their collections. This is what it means to be a library – to make judgments about which books are worth reading and which are not, which ideas belong on the shelves and which do not.”
It is the American Center for Law and Justice that contributed to the arguments with a friend-of-the-court brief, and explained, “For over a year, the ACLJ has been fighting to protect children from far-Left groups that want to expose children to sexually explicit content without your knowledge. School districts have been inundated with far-Left lobbying, demands, and lawsuits seeking to force them to include reprehensible and disturbing content in the children’s sections of school libraries. We’ve been working with school districts around the country to fight back and allow school officials – who represent the parents of the school children they serve – to empower parental rights and protect children from sexualized and Marxist indoctrination. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals just issued a decision that will assist us in this fight.”
The decision, “unprecedented,” according to the ACLJ, resulted in two significant factors.
“First, [individuals and groups] cannot invoke a right to receive information to challenge a library’s removal of books. … Second, a library’s collection decisions are government speech and therefore not subject to Free Speech challenge,” the ACLJ said.
“This means that school libraries cannot be forced to house inappropriate material no matter how many lawsuits radical librarians and far-Left groups like the ACLU file.”
In this case, some people from Llano County sued the Texas library for removing 17 books because of their sexual and/or racial themes.
“The plaintiffs in this case argued that they had a ‘right to receive information’ – even sexually explicit information – under the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment and that the public library (and taxpayers) must supply them with whatever books they desire,” the ACLJ charged.
“The plaintiffs disingenuously argued that the removal of the inappropriate books constituted a book ban reminiscent of ‘totalitarian regimes.’”
The 5th Circuit said, “It is one thing to tell the government it cannot stop you from receiving a book. The First Amendment protects your right to do that. It is another thing for you to tell the government which books it must keep in the library. The First Amendment does not give you that right to demand that.”
The ACLJ said, “The Fifth Circuit’s ruling is a breath of fresh air and represents a long, overdue, legally sound, and commonsense approach to this issue. As the Fifth Circuit noted, the plaintiffs incorrectly ‘demand to receive information from the government itself.’”
“If – as the groups we’ve battled have been arguing – ‘[P]eople can challenge which books libraries remove, they can challenge which books libraries buy. . . . Suppose a patron complains that the library does not have a book she wants. The library refuses to buy it, so she sues.’ Where would it end? It wouldn’t, and groups like the ACLU wouldn’t stop until you, the taxpayer, are forced to fund and stock pornography and other inappropriate content on every children’s library shelf in America.”