Which Libraries Are Under Siege Today? (All Of Them, Katie)
Texas lawman really wanted to arrest librarians; Idaho libraries and parents fight back.
Time for another quick roundup of the rightwing War on Libraries, because the GOP doesn’t want kids (or anyone, really) reading, and certainly not reading anything that mentions sex, or LGBTQ+ people, gay penguin lust, or how the human body does sex things. Especially not if books make any of that sound interesting. (And even if they don’t.) Two tales from the trenches today:
Texas: Inspector Javert Vs The School Librarians
We’ll start in Granbury, Texas, where a local chief deputy constable spent two years trying to find some kind of felony to charge three school librarians with, because by God he knows they were corrupting children by having evil bad pornographic books on their libraries’ shelves. Evil books by Black authors, too!
NBC News and its local affiliate NBC5 Dallas-Fort Worth used public records laws to obtain an 842-page file on the investigation by Constable Scott London, who — big surprise! — is also affiliated with that wingnut “constitutional sheriffs” movement. Those are the militia-adjacent antigovernment extremists who insist sheriffs are the highest legal authority in the US, an idea that isn’t actually part of the Constitution, but that’s never stopped them. Dude also wanted to set up a local chapter of the Oath Keepers, though NBC News isn’t clear on whether that actually came to be.
This really is one of those You Gotta Read The Whole Thing Because It’s All Deeply Batshit stories, but here’s a good overview video from NBC News / KXAS, including body cam video of London photographing library books and trying to bully librarians and the school superintendent with the threat of criminal charges over books.
Constable London did him a full-bore investigation into the three librarians’ alleged felony crimes of “distributing harmful materials” to minors, complete with subpoenas, public records searches, and — because you have to know who the “victims” were — obtaining the names of students who’d checked out dirty filthbooks like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and others.
The investigation all came to naught this June when the local prosecutor, Hood County District Attorney Ryan Sinclair, declined to file charges, finding that there wasn’t sufficient evidence of a crime (and as the video and story point out, even Texas’s stupid statute only applies to materials that are “utterly without redeeming social value for minors,” borrowing from the standby Miller v. California Supreme Court test of what constitutes obscenity. (Then again, given the current Court, Miller may end up going down the memory hole, too.)
The investigation was sparked after two local Christian Nationalist moms, Monica Brown and Karen Lowery, got angry that the school board hadn’t removed every book that was 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 would file a criminal complaint, and by golly they sure did. They gave London a list of 11 books and passages they said were “pornography” because they contained descriptions of sex or rape, and he got to work trying to jail some librarians.
He reported purchasing each of the 11 titles named in Lowery and Brown’s police report and, over the course of a few months in 2022, read them in their entirety. His investigative file included more than 120 photos of passages he believed to be obscene, with highlights he made with a marker.
Excellent use of two years of public police funding, and this time the attempt to toss librarians in jail was unsuccessful because a local prosecutor actually paid attention to the law. Might be nice to have some better protections from censorship though, huh?
Idaho: Library Group, Private Schools, Parents Sue To Block ‘Adults Only’ Library Law
In Idaho, two private schools, a community library group, a privately funded public library, a church that operates a lending library, and several parents and teenagers are suing in federal court to block enforcement of 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 be subject to getting sued. The stupid law, House Bill 710, took effect July 1 and has already prompted one small-town library to ban unaccompanied children because the library building is too small to partition off an adults-only section.
You will note that the lawsuit doesn’t appear to include any taxpayer-funded schools or libraries among the plaintiffs; the complaint actually focuses on that fact in its claim that the law restricts the First Amendment rights of private institutions, which the state isn’t supposed to have any control over. HB 710, the plaintiffs say,
limits the ability of private K-12 schools and privately funded public libraries to provide minors (whatever their age) with books, art, movies, and other materials that contain non-obscene content that is disfavored by the State of Idaho. Through the Act’s vague and overbroad definition of material that is “harmful to minors,” the Act infringes on the First Amendment rights of such schools and libraries.
The lawsuit also accuses the state of violating the plaintiffs’ 14th Amendment right to due process.
The same constitutional arguments could be made when it comes to public institutions, but this suit may be a nice wedge to sidestep any “power of the purse” justifications for restricting content. And if it ends up with the whole law being found unconstitutional, so much the better. Smart!
The suit argues that the law’s “vague and overbroad definition of ‘harmful to minors’ conflicts with decades of settled constitutional law” and oversteps the state’s authority. It also takes issue with the statute’s vague and downright weird definition of what constitutes prohibited depictions or descriptions of “sexual conduct,” which includes “any act of […] homosexuality,” which makes no distinction between explicit porn and, say, a picture book showing two fully clothed dads helping their third-grader with math homework at a kitchen table, but very homosexually.
The suit seeks to keep the law from being enforced, and to have it declared unconstitutional.
So there you go: Sanity is winning small victories in the culture wars, and we are completely convinced that Americans are good and sick of being bullied by rightwing creeps. This nonsense will not stand.
[NBC News / Courthouse News Service]
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If it takes you months to read 11 books written for children, you’re a lazy moron.
The LIBRARY! sign is perfect. And it verbs the noun and actually makes the sign an imperative sentence. You shall all LIBRARY.