A federal court ruled last week that Texas public libraries cannot remove books simply because they discuss topics such as “butts and farts.”
The case was one of the most bizarre cases of library censorship in recent years, but it still led the majority to make the fateful choice to find that removing library books from libraries was unconstitutional. “Want to limit their access to ideas [disagree]”.
The legal battle began in 2021 when Llano County Judge Ron Cunningham received complaints about the “presence of pornographic and overtly sexual books in the children’s section of the library.” The complainant was particularly disturbed by children’s books about “butts and farts”.
One aggrieved citizen, Llano resident Rochelle Wells, “has been checking the books for months to prevent others from accessing them.”
After the complaint, Cunningham told library director Amber Milum to remove the books from library shelves. After receiving more complaints, Cunningham told the library director that several other books “depicting any type of sexual activity or questionable nudity” were also removed.
Milum later testified that she would not have removed the books as part of a typical curatorial exercise — she had simply removed them at the direction of county officials.
To make matters worse, in January 2022, the county’s library board was dissolved and replaced with new board members. Two of the complainants who had successfully pressured Cunningham to order the removal of the books were placed on the new board.
The new board “implemented several policy changes, including banning Milum from their meetings and requiring her to seek approval before purchasing any new books,” according to the opinion.
In 2022, seven library patrons filed a lawsuit arguing that removing the book was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Ultimately, a lower court agreed and issued a preliminary injunction requiring the defendants to return the removed books. But the county appealed. Just this week, a panel of judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the plaintiffs.
Drawing on other cases surrounding attempts at library censorship, the majority opinion constructed a series of “rules” for how books should be removed from library collections. “Librarians may consider the content of books when making curatorial decisions,” Justice Jaques Weiner Jr. wrote in the majority opinion. “However, their discretion must be balanced against the First Amendment rights of readers…and a book must not be removed simply because policymakers do not want readers to understand the book’s ideas or information.”
The motivation for removing the targeted book from the Llamo Public Library does not fit this test. The opinion states that censors want the books gone simply because they don’t like the content.
“Governmental actors may not remove books from public libraries with the intent to deprive patrons of exposure to ideas with which they disagree,” the opinion concluded. “Because this is clearly what happened in Llano County, the plaintiffs have proven that they The likelihood of success of a First Amendment claim.”
