Public school libraries shouldn’t be culture war battlegrounds
Public school library shelves have become the latest front in our nation’s bitter culture war — and the battle has reached the Panhandle. A federal district court in Pensacola is now hearing a lawsuit challenging the restriction and removal of books in Escambia County’s public-school libraries.
Filed earlier this year by parents, authors, a free speech organization, and a publishing company, the suit alleges Escambia County’s school board violated the First Amendment by removing books for ideological reasons. The suit claims the board overruled a district review committee and even fired the superintendent to permanently remove books like And Tango Makes Three, an award-winning children’s book about a family of penguins challenged for allegedly advancing an “LGBTQ agenda.”
In a recent order, Judge T. Kent Wetherell appealed to common sense, writing that "politicians, federal judges, or individual citizens/parents/students who for their own personal reasons want a book removed from or kept in the library" shouldn't have the sole say over the library books on school shelves.
Judge Wetherell has the right idea. Government officials and others with political agendas can’t impose blanket bans on what your kids can read. That's your decision to make as a parent. And while the books on the chopping block today are about penguins, tomorrow they might be about the Founding Fathers, faith, or war heroes.
To be sure, our public-school librarians should consider a book’s quality, whether its material is appropriate for the audience’s age, and how it serves their school’s educational goals. These decisions are subject to democratic oversight through elected school boards. But the First Amendment prohibits those same school boards from restricting or removing books from shelves due to ideological disagreement with the ideas they contain.
That was the core conclusion of a plurality of Supreme Court Justices when the Court considered the question of school library book bans just over 40 years ago in 1982’s Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico.
Like the Escambia County case, Pico involved a First Amendment challenge to a school board’s removal of books from a public-school library. The board singled out books — including classics like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Richard Wright’s Black Boy — because of their inclusion on a list created by a partisan organization.
The plurality opinion concluded school boards may remove titles based on factors like “educational suitability” — but not, as Justice Harry Blackmun put it, “for the purpose of restricting access to the political ideas or social perspectives discussed in them, when that action is motivated simply by the officials’ disapproval of the ideas involved.”
That conclusion captures the First Amendment’s central rule: In the United States, we don’t ban views just because government officials don’t like them. It’s never too soon for students in Escambia County and across the country to learn that fundamentally American lesson.
Will Creeley is the legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan nonprofit organization dedicated to defending free speech nationwide.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Panhandle First Amendment case shows threat to public school libraries
