A group of library patrons in Llano County, Texas, are suing the county, alleging censorship and First Amendment violations.
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Crispin la valiente/Getty Images
A group of library patrons in Llano County, Texas, are suing the county, alleging censorship and First Amendment violations.
Crispin la valiente/Getty Images
A group of Texas residents who’re “card-carrying members” of their native library system are suing officers within the county the place they stay, claiming officers engaged in censorship in violation of the First Amendment once they banned a slew of books the officers deemed inappropriate.
The library patrons filed the federal lawsuit towards officers in Llano County, which is situated northwest of Austin, naming the county choose, county commissioners and library officers as defendants.
The group says that the county authorities’s acknowledged function of eradicating “pornographic” materials from public libraries was really a marketing campaign of political and non secular censorship.
“Though Plaintiffs differ in their ages, professions, and individual religious and political beliefs, they are fiercely united in their love for reading public library books and in their belief that the government cannot dictate which books they can and cannot read,” the lawsuit reads.
Jennifer Buchanan, Llano County court docket coordinator, mentioned the county wouldn’t touch upon the pending lawsuit.
Efforts amongst Republican leaders to ban sure books have ramped up throughout the nation, with a specific concentrate on titles with themes about race and LGBTQ points. The American Library Association mentioned it tracked an unprecedented four-fold increase in efforts to ban books final 12 months.
Among the books faraway from the Llano County library system, in accordance to the lawsuit, have been Maurice Sendak’s youngsters’s book In the Night Kitchen, during which one character seems nude in a single scene, and Robie H. Harris’s It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health.
Other in style nonfiction books have been additionally faraway from circulation, together with Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, for which Pulitzer Prize-winning creator Isabel Wilkerson earned a slew of awards.
The lawsuit alleges officers banned the books for political causes
The group of residents says county officers claimed they have been getting rid of books to defend youngsters from graphic sexual content material. But the group says that none of the eliminated books have been pornographic and officers as an alternative focused books that conflicted with their political and non secular views.
County officers additionally needed to ban two books from OverDrive, a digital catalog that gave library patrons entry to greater than 17,000 e-books and audiobooks that the plaintiffs say was often utilized by older residents and residents with bodily disabilities, the go well with says.
Because they could not management the titles on OverDrive, the Llano County Commissioners as an alternative voted to suspend the use of OverDrive altogether in December, the go well with says, though it has a mechanism for parental controls.
The plaintiffs additionally criticized how county officers reshaped the library’s board.
In January, commissioners dissolved the present library advisory board and reconstituted it to give the commissioners extra energy over appointments to the board, according to DailyTrib.com. The new board voted to make its conferences non-public, which the group of residents mentioned violated their 14th Amendment proper to due course of.