I know Florida, Texas, and other counties have tried and succeeded to ban books, I wonder how that is even legal since we have the first amendment. I tried doing research on this since Huntington Beach is banning books and people were petitioning against that at the main library.
I made a little post asking people to petition on the Orange County sub.
There’s a difference between a book being
- banned from curriculum
- banned from a school library
- requiring parental / guardian permission to be checked out (usually for x rated content)
- being outright “banned”
Bans often rely on the obscenity exception to the 1st Amendment:
https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/first-amendment-limits--obscenity.html
SCOTUS has never given a clear, well-defined, repeatable test to say exactly what “obscenity” even means, so local jurisdictions are free to push the envelope.
If that sounds like a pile of bullshit waiting to be exploited, yes, and that’s exactly why we’re seeing this happening.
I wish there was no obscenity exception. I think all media deserves to exist regardless of its obscenity as long as it’s not directly harming someone (like certain types of porn for instance)
The problem is the obscenity exception is also used for things like preventing someone from walking around a public park with a giant sign covered in gore porn. Something like that I think is obviously pretty okay to ban, but clearly it gets misused for a lot of homophobic/transphobic type stuff.
walking around a public park with a giant sign covered in gore porn
anti-abortion protesters have entered the chat
Just need to have a case for it being a political statement.
The first ammendment isn’t unlimited there are a fair amount of restrictions. The ones that are allowed follow strict scrutiny, which is basically a two part test. There must be a compelling state interest, AND the law must use the least restive means possible to achieve that interest.
Most these book bans likely don’t meet that standard. They are allowed to exist because they are considered valid until ruled otherwise. To overrule these bans it would be required for someone to have standing that they are materially harmed by the ban. This is how most bans will stay, as proving someone has standing is pretty difficult in this case.
They’re also not banning the books, so there’s that. At least not in the sense that would require strict scrutiny in the situation OP is talking about.
They didn’t ban books. That’s just fake news.
