CENSORSHIP
By Alex Nguyen
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a challenge against a small Central Texas county’s removal of 17 books from its public libraries, including some that focus on race and gender.
The Monday move by the high court lets stand the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling that says the First Amendment doesn’t acknowledge a right to receive information. It is also a major blow to the yearslong legal fight led by seven Llano County residents against what they have called a coordinated censorship campaign by the county government, amid a broader wave of book bans in Texas.
Attorneys for the library patrons and the county didn’t immediately respond to comment requests from The Texas Tribune.
PEN America, a nonprofit that tracks book bans throughout the country which filed a brief in support of the residents, blasted the rejection in a news release.
“Leaving the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in place erodes the most elemental principles of free speech and allows state and local governments to exert ideological control over the people with impunity,” said Elly Brinkley, staff attorney for the group’s U.S. Free Expression Programs. “The government has no place telling people what they can and cannot read.”
Bob Corn-Revere, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s chief counsel, also said this was a missed opportunity for the Supreme Court to clarify public libraries’ constitutional status.
“Because it failed to do so, we will face a period of uncertainty as appellate courts in different parts of the country apply different standards governing the freedom to read,” he said in a statement.
The legal fight started in 2022 after the seven residents filed a federal lawsuit against the Llano County judge and other county officials, alleging that they had taken several books off the library shelves, paused new book orders and replaced the county library board members with those in favor of book bans.
Several of the titles removed were the same as those included in a list of 850 books that former state Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, considered objectionable. Some of the affected books include Jazz Jennings’ “Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen” and Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group.”
U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman, an Obama appointee, ordered the reinstatement of the library books in a 2023 preliminary injunction.
But following an appeal, the majority of the full 5th Circuit court overturned the district court’s ruling in May. Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee, wrote in the majority opinion that the right to information couldn’t be invoked to push back against a public library’s decision about which books to keep and which to remove. He also considered a library’s collection decision to be government speech.
“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,” Duncan wrote.
“All Llano County has done here is what libraries have been doing for two centuries: decide which books they want in their collections. That 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. If you doubt that, next time you visit the library ask the librarian to direct you to the Holocaust Denial Section.”
Seven judges out of 17 dissented, with Judge Stephen Higginson — an Obama appointee — calling these arguments “disturbingly flippant and legally unsound.”
“Because I would not have our court ‘join the book burners,’ I dissent,” Higginson wrote.
The U.S. Supreme Court did not provide a reason for denying the residents’ petition Monday.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
