The judicial overreach and activism that call Texas home have led to a string of questionable judgments and multiple reversals in cases in which the courts chose books, not librarians.
Recently rated as the State having the worst quality of life in the US of A, this stuff sure makes Texas suck. Angry people complaining to the court over books in the library, rather than the library, of course, found a sympathetic Texas judge. Said judge ordered the librarian to remove books about "butts and farts" from the library. The library prevailed on appeal, but that decision has also been appealed with ridiculous effect. The mess is so big the court is going to try and fix the mess it made again.
This case, however, is a mess. It began (as far too many do these days) with a supposedly concerned citizen griping about some books they'd likely never even looked at, much less read. Rather than approach the Llano County library directly, they took their complaints to county judge Ron Cunningham. The judge, unbelievably, ordered the library to remove the books, including the (and I'm quoting directly here) "books about butts and farts."
Llano County Commissioner Jerry Moss also inserted himself into this mess by telling the library director to comply with the apparently unlawful order from the judge, telling her to "pick her battles" and that refusing to comply with the judge's request would result in "bad publicity."
Having succeeded with getting "butts and farts" books off the shelves, another resident took a list written by former Texas state rep Matt Krause of books he considered to be "pornographic filth" to the judge, who then ordered the library director to remove all books that "depict any type of sexual activity or questionable nudity." (Matt Krause is exactly the sort of person you think he is, even if this is all you know about him at this point.)
While that order did not clear the shelves of dozens of romance novels, it did result in the removal of LGBTQ+ content, as well as two books about racism in the United States (Caste; They Called Themselves K.K.K.). These are the sorts of books being challenged and banned all over the US right now because the Party of Free Speech has collectively decided no one should be allowed to learn about endemic racism and/or sexual identity.
This resulted in a lawsuit to void the judge's order and return these books to the shelves. The lower court agreed with the plaintiffs and ordered the books to be made available again. The county appealed and the Fifth Circuit went to work making a mess of it.
…
But the least the court can do on the second pass is take a closer look at the directives issued by the county judge, which has nothing to do with discretion and curation, and everything to do with one branch of the government acting as a censor for a different branch of the government. That's the bigger issue here. Librarians should be allowed to curate content and they should be responsive to complaints from library patrons. But these patrons didn't talk to the library director. They went straight to a judge and got the judge to issue orders that overrode the discretion of librarians. And unless that gets addressed, this will become a favorite tool for people who think they should get to decide what content everyone has access to.
TechDirt
