Most people would promptly respond to the question that is the title of this post: NO! the First Amendment was written to protect the people against government over-reach. The very question is absurd on its face. Yet Republican Attorneys General have argued that the First Amendment protects their right to ban books. No, no, no, a million times NO!
Chris Tomlinson, a columnist for The Houston Chronicle, wrote about the case:
Book banners in Llano County and Florida’s attorney general will try to convince a federal appeals court Tuesday that the First Amendment grants elected officials the unlimited right to remove books from public libraries.
Conservatives will turn freedom of speech on its head by arguing that politicians are expressing themselves when they ban books, and therefore, the Constitution protects book bans. In a perverse twist, they will make this argument during Banned Books Week, the time of year when writers defend the right to share ideas.
The Little v. Llano case will undoubtedly go to the U.S. Supreme Court. Seventeen Republican state attorneys general have joined Ken Paxton in defending the Llano County Commissioners Court’s order to remove 17 books from the public library. Not the school library, mind you, but the library system for all residents.
The banned books include the award-winning “They Called Themselves the K.K.K: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group,” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson, and “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health,” by Robie Harris.
Llano is not alone. Texas has led the nation in book bans, according to PEN America, a nonprofit freedom of speech group of which I am a member.
Historically, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment severely limits the power of government to control speech and other forms of expression. Governments are not allowed to ban books based solely on their viewpoint; there must be a public safety issue.
Llano County residents sued in federal court last year to have the books returned. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman found that Llano officials only banned the books because they disagreed with the content and determined the commissioners had no compelling government interest to remove them. He ordered all the books restored to library shelves.
The county appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which split in a preliminary decision. The full 17-judge court will hear arguments Tuesday.
The 18 Republican attorneys general who have joined the case want the judges to accept a new interpretation of the First Amendment, one first pushed in Florida. They argue government officials have free speech rights, and the court must protect them as much as a librarian’s, a writer’s or a reader’s civil liberties.
“The county’s decisions over which books to offer its patrons in its public libraries, at its own expense, are its own speech,” the states argued in a court filing last month. “The government does not violate anyone’s free speech rights merely by speaking — no matter what it chooses to say or not to say.”
If Little v. Llano makes it to the Supreme Court, and the justices agree with this argument, they will hobble the foundation of our democracy: the free exchange of ideas. The flip side of the freedom to write is the freedom to read. One is useless without the other.
Libraries play a crucial role in a free society. They are repositories not only of history and entertainment but of accumulated knowledge and new ideas. Books are expensive, and libraries make them available to the entire community.
Public libraries are, by definition, government entities financed with taxpayer dollars. In a free society, they must be nonpartisan and contain a wide range of content absent political litmus tests. A conservative victory for Llano would turn politicians into thought police.
The conservative activists who complained about the Llano library books relied on a list of 850 titles published by former state Rep. Matt Krause, a Fort Worth Republican, in 2021. Krause focused on books about racism, LGBTQ issues or anything else that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish.”
Krause was among the state lawmakers who limited how teachers can discuss slavery and discrimination against African Americans because it might make descendants of slaveholders uncomfortable. Possessing “The 1619 Project” is now a firing offense at Texas public schools.
Where does it end if politicians have a free speech right to ban books? We know politicians try to outdo each other with ideological purity tests. Activists on the left and right will draft lists of authorized and prohibited books, and libraries will have to restock their shelves after every election.
As for those who argue libraries are full of pornography, I say poppycock. The American Library Association and professional librarians follow well-considered procedures in choosing what titles to carry, and one person’s taste should not determine what a library buys.
If politicians do end up determining what we can find at the library, you’ll have fellow Texans to thank.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Florida does not ban books.” –Governor Ronnie “Go-Go Boots” DeSantis.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Bob,
This is way off topic, but have you been following the presidential resignations? University of San Francisco, Rutgers, and Brandies in the last couple of weeks. Today’s opinion piece in the NYT gives some insight into President Holloway’s resignation. I had breakfast with him a couple of years ago and he seemed a very capable guy.
A couple of quotes from the NYT:
“It’s a punishing job in normal times,” Holloway, a scholar of African American history, told me when I spoke to him last week. “But the standards we’re being held to are impossible. I had to ask myself, ‘What is it I want to do, how can I do it, and is this the right position?’”
“I had hard choices to make at Yale and Northwestern, too, but people there knew who I was as a person, and it’s hard to be nasty when you’re up close and live,” Holloway said. “I didn’t have an appreciation for the fact that at a place this big, the president is an abstraction, and once someone is an abstraction, you can say anything you want about that person. It’s exhausting.”
LikeLike
Fascinating, TE. I will have a look at this info.
LikeLike
Freedom of the press is not absolute. You cannot, for example, publish detailed schematics for building a nuclear weapon or synthesizing nerve agent chemical weapons in your basement.
LikeLike
But you can find those schematics on the web.
LikeLike
Lots and lots of fundamentalists are sickos who think that sex is “dirty.” Often, perhaps even typically, these same folks are secretly extremely kinky. Here’s what I want to say about such people: Being them is its own punishment.
It’s time to end the millennia of sex shaming indulged in by official Abrahamic religions. This has been an enormous impediment to human happiness and flourishing.
LikeLike
The contempt for this world and for the body and, ipso facto, for sexuality and pleasure, on the part of the Abrahamic religions–technically called these religions’ Contemptus Mundi–has been to the cultures that have grown up worldwide and been influenced by them like forever chemicals released into an aquifer. They have poisoned our cultures for two thousand years and longer now. It’s time to do the heavy lifting to clean up this toxic mess that has thoroughly permeated our ways of thinking and speaking because it has done a number on human flourishing. SEX AND SEXUALITY ARE NOT “DIRTY.” They are one of the glories of the Earth. Here’s what’s obscene: the bizarre obsessions that people have with other people’s sex lives, the Puritan prohibitions, the illegality of sex work. Consider the latter. IMHO, one who is an expert in the arts of love should be celebrated and honored, not relegated to the fringes of society where he or she is made a commodity for trading my gangsters and exploitation by pimps. The Buddha himself studied with the courtesan Kamala, and while that was not his ultimate path, it was one that he honored.
St. Jerome wrote that it was sinful to sit in a garden because it was pleasurable.
He was a “father of the church” and one sick individual.
LikeLike
cx: It [Contemptus Mundi] has poisoned our cultures for two thousand years and longer now.
NB: Yeshua of Nazareth said again and again that the kingdom, the New Jerusalem, would be established right here on the good, green Earth. It some of the Gnostic gospels, he is even clearer: the kingdom is in you and around you. You have but to wake TF up and see it and make it so.
LikeLike
It is very sick people who are repulsed by sexuality or think it “dirty,” people like John Ashcroft, who put the drapes in front of the naked Lady Justice in the DOJ building. Again, being someone like that is it’s own punishment. Enlightened people should cast off Contemptus Mundi as the sickness, the disease of the body politick, that it is.
LikeLike
SEX AND SEXUALITY ARE NOT “DIRTY.”
That ain’t what the nuns tried to teach us back in grade school in the 60s.
LikeLike
I taught in an all-girls Catholic school and was present several times when the nuns (whom I loved, btw) helped the visiting priest to don his vestments for the monthly all-school mass. And what I saw saddened me terribly. The nuns would indulged in a little quick, surreptitious touching of the priest as they put the vestments on him. Their church had denied them one of the glories of the Earth, and this was terribly, terribly sad. What a cost!!!!
LikeLike
This is a nicely posed rhetorical question: let’s see how the know-nothings respond.
LikeLike
I highly recommend the movie “JoJo Rabbit” to all the readers of this blog. Think “Play it Again Sam”, but replace Humphrey Bogart with Adolf Hitler. I saw a lot of similarities between the movie’s Nazis and our current Maga Supporters. The film shows JoJo’s experiences in his Nazi youth camp and at the end of the one of the scenes one of the teachers joyously shouts “Alight kids, now let’s go burn some books!”. I find these book banning Maga Heads are just as ridiculous as the Nazis in this movie.
LikeLike
“JoJo Rabbit” is an incredibly hilarious and satirical film definitely worth watching.
LikeLike
The authoritarian governors that are banning books assume they can do what they want unless a court steps in to stop them. DeSantis has ongoing battles with the courts over his culture war issues, and he has lost some of the battles. I didn’t believe that a state would be able to insert itself between a patient and a doctor. I naively believed Roe protected a woman’s right to choose. Thanks to the rogue Supreme Court, we are in the “twilight zone” where right wing extremist leaders impose unpopular policy on people with possible deadly consequences.
LikeLike
If the 6 bought and paid for fascist justices on the US Supreme court rule in favor of the banning, they are saying it’s up to the states to decide, and the US Constitution is no longer the primary law governing the country.
The US Constitution is supposed to have precedence over state constitutions.
Breaking up and getting rid of the United States as a global power is one of Putin’s goals. He’s also working to break up NATO and the EU alliance.
LikeLike
Is it just me [a layman], or is there something obviously and terribly wrong with applying this argument to this case? “government officials have free speech rights, and the court must protect them as much as a librarian’s, a writer’s, or a reader’s civil liberties.”
That argument seems to me to apply to SPEECH by government officials, not to dictates with the force of law over the “free speech rights” of librarians, writers and readers.
The 17 A/Gs elaborate: “The county’s decisions over which books to offer its patrons in its public libraries, at its own expense, are its own speech. The government does not violate anyone’s free speech rights merely by speaking– no matter what it chooses to say or not to say.”
This statement is more nuanced, but again seems to conflate speech with dictates that have the force of law. It does so by conflating “curating” — the selection from what’s available, according to budget & local’s tastes/ interests– with censorship– the a priori removal of selected titles from what’s available to curate, per the druthers [“free speech”] of elected county officials.
LikeLike
And there’s another layer to the second part above: when we elected our county officials, did we do so with knowledge that they would appoint themselves arbiters of what books may be eliminated from consideration by their appointed county library commission/ hired librarians? If not, they have no authorization by the people to do so, regardless of their “free speech rights.”
The argument presented here seems to put the free speech rights of elected county officials (as regards selecting which books the public library may stock) in contention with the rights of librarians, writers/ authors/ publishers, and local readers/ taxpayers. The orderly distribution of power from top to bottom (& from bottom to top)– local govt & its bureaucracy– is destroyed, for this purpose at least.
Let’s say the chastened county populace, now aware their elected officials may freely assert this power over library commission (et al, down to readers): how will they vote in future? Will they have to quiz candidates on their degree of social conservatism, and whether they plan to exercise it as regards censoring books from the available list curated by their library commission/ librarians– just to ensure they can access commercially & commonly available titles from their public library (as opposed to buying them)? Seems tail wagging dog!
LikeLike
brilliantly argued, Ginny
LikeLike
Thanks, Bob!
LikeLike
This argument is also related to the Musk/Brazil conflict. In both cases, it pits government power over the power of a singular person or group–not “free speech” but how and whether a singular person or small group can wield their specific set of accumulated powers of over others.
The question then is not about freely speaking or writing or communicating.
Rather, it becomes a question of who or what group has and can exercise their power, and then about what actually informs their power, including their intent.
In both cases, for the Brazil government and the librarians, their source of power is the backdrop of all the reasonability that pours into and grounds democratic institutions over the years, the laws, accepted procedures, regulations, etc., and of those making decisions having undergone a remarkable and reasonable set of already accepted open-aired vetting forces . . . all grounded in democratic institutions and ideals . . . which CAN be corrupted anywhere along the line but where, in most cases, are informed by well-developed internal regulations and people who honor them.
It is THAT, OR one arbitrary power source over another, as in a dictatorship. However, we and the Brazil people can all hope that our democratic political base, its principles and methods of operation, are regularly informed by an electorate who has their political ducks in a proper row–as we all know, not a given.
With that in mind, however, for Musk . . . who apparently wants to allow free speech, but only for one group that happens to match his own ideological bent, and BTW like Trump, who is apparently OKAY with lies, finds his source of power in Musk’s singular truncated personality and bank account. If his context were another dictatorship instead of a democracy, he might have some hard-power pull. But not in the political situation that spawned the idea of freedom to the people, including speech, in the first place.
For the book banners, they find their source of power in usurping others’ actual freedom of speech (and as another said here, its correlate, the freedom to read for anyone who cares to do so) under the selective powers of a vetted librarian working in a democratic institution (a PUBLIC library, whose very name speaks of freedom of thought) and who, again, lives in a democracy that is itself based on vetted principles (non-arbitrary).
I loved that picture of someone shooting themselves in the foot. CBK
LikeLike