Texas legal battles over library books intensifies with latest lawsuit

The furor over e-book removals in Texas libraries simply obtained louder.

Seven residents of Llano County filed a federal lawsuit Monday towards a number of public officers — together with the Llano county decide and the library system’s director — alleging that the residents’ 1st and 14th modification rights have been violated by a months-long marketing campaign to take away and prohibit entry to books deemed offensive or inappropriate.

Llano County – with 21,000 residents, about an hour northwest of Austin – has been a hotbed of controversy for months, as conservative elected officers and their appointees have pushed to get sure titles off cabinets or in restricted sections.

“It’s scary,” mentioned the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Ellen Leonida. “There’s a small group of people that are systematically undertaking an effort to ensure that nothing that veers from their viewpoints appears in the public library. You can’t quiet public discourse through wholesale censorship.”

The lawsuit attracts a timeline that dates again to final summer season. It alleges that’s when Llano County Judge Ron Cunningham, county commissioner Jerry Don Moss and library system director Amber Milum started to take away kids’s titles that had obtained complaints from the neighborhood – together with 1971 Caldecott Medal winner “In the Night Kitchen” by Maurice Sendak.

Milum additionally determined to take away some well being schooling image books – together with “I Broke My Butt!” and “Larry the Farting Leprechaun” – from the cabinets, putting them in her file cupboard and deleting them from the net catalog, in line with the swimsuit.

Efforts to succeed in commissioner Moss and Milum weren’t instantly profitable. Cunningham’s administrative assistant, Jennifer Buchanan, mentioned that he couldn’t touch upon pending litigation.

The lawsuit alleges that in late October — shortly after Texas Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, knowledgeable college officers that he was launching an investigation into 850 books discovered on college campuses that dealt with problems with race, gender id and sexuality — Milum requested her librarians to relocate any of these titles into the grownup part.

Then on the behest of the commissioner’s court docket, the library system closed for 4 days in December so all the system’s kids’s titles may very well be totally reviewed.

After discovering two books on Krause’s record out there for checkout by way of the free e-book and audiobook service OverDrive, the county’s commissioners court docket then voted unanimously to droop entry to all 17,000 of OverDrive’s titles to patrons.

Last month, one of many system’s three librarians was fired after refusing an order from Milum to take away titles deemed “inappropriate” or “pornographic” from a department location, in line with news reviews.

The plaintiffs, all library card holders within the county, have additionally cited a number of different efforts by county officers to scale back transparency and public accountability. They allege that the dissolution of the outdated library board was performed in an effort to appoint extra “politically aligned” members who may then redraft new assortment and removing insurance policies, in line with the swimsuit. They additionally allege that calling the brand new library board an “advisory” physique, was performed to sidestep the state’s Open Meeting Act and open information legal guidelines.

The lawsuit is the latest legal battle over e-book removals in Texas.

In late February, the American Civil Liberties Union despatched a letter to Granbury ISD asking that district to reinstate the 131 titles – a lot of them that includes LGBT characters or addressing racism in America – pulled for assessment.

“Granbury ISD’s mass book removals provide a roadmap for further removals that violate the First Amendment’s clear protections for access to an array of ideas,” the ACLU’s letter learn. “Schools, and in particular school libraries, must be a place where students have such broad access to a wide variety of ideas — both the popular and unpopular ones of the moment.”

Three books have been ultimately eliminated by the district, for “sexually explicit content or illustrations.”

Within the previous week, the ACLU has filed comparable letters to different districts throughout the state, together with Houston and San Antonio’s North East.

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