Let’s start back a bit, with what will be an honest question from many about the cultural right in response to what this column will address: Why would libraries go to court to try to hold on to the right to make dirty books available. to the children?
The answer is that librarians do not offer pornography. It’s that they understand that people have different sensitivities. It’s just that they know that some of their books, usually in the young adult sections and which acknowledge homosexuality or gender issues in an accepted way, will be considered inappropriate for children by parents, which means alleging a inadequacy that they personally disapprove of.
It’s just that there are processes in place for citizens to submit objections to specific books and for librarians to review those allegedly objectionable books. It’s just that, yes, objections are usually respectfully rejected.
Here’s how it might happen: Let’s say there’s a book about war that contains a photograph of bomber pilots standing next to the noses of their planes on which “nose art” of exposed female breasts has been painted. A parent complains that kids shouldn’t watch it. The library’s position is that the complaining parent should prevent their children from seeing it, but should not try to ban or confiscate an important book because of a photograph.
The image was not pornography. It was the story of the war.
The librarians think that the answers are to demand the accompaniment of the parents for the little ones; that parents put their older children’s library cards into family accounts and otherwise monitor their own children responsibly, and that society resist banning or sequestering in special “slot rooms” such as sometimes derisively called, all books that personally offend some. but not all
The biggest problem with the cultural right has always been not what it believes culturally or religiously, but what it believes governmentally: that everyone should be made to live the way they believe. This can be crossed with a diverse society which is granted the constitutional rights of freedom of speech, religion, association and equal rights.
So that brings us to the beginning: a large number of plaintiffs: public libraries in central Arkansas, Fayetteville and Eureka Springs, state and national library associations and advocacy groups, a student, a parent, commercial bookstores in Little Rock and Fayetteville, and the American Civil Liberties Union, signed a lawsuit filed last week in federal court for the Western District of Arkansas.
The lawsuit seeks to invalidate a bill passed last session that would establish a policy review process by which books deemed obscene by citizens could be removed from the main library’s access and placed in special rooms inaccessible to children under 17, even. provided that a librarian could be charged and imprisoned if one of these seized books came into the possession of a minor in a way that the librarian “knowingly” allowed.
By “political review process,” I mean the new law’s provisions that objections would go to school boards, city councils, or county quorum courts, depending on the type of library, rather than to review boards or judicial bodies created by the library.
(DROP CAP) The lawsuit claims that all of the above amounts to a “vague and broad law preventing Arkansas public libraries and booksellers from making available constitutionally protected books or other media.”
An adult who is told the book they want to check out or buy is in a private area in the back is being restricted by nuisance and visibility, the suit says. A small rural library with no space for a private room and no resources to build one is effectively being told to ban the book from everyone, the suit also says.
All of this, the suit alleges, runs afoul of the First and 14th Amendments to the US Constitution.
That’s why, the suit argues, the new law’s granting of the option to libraries to pull books from the appeals process during the decision-making period amounts to “prior restraint” illegal
And, by the way, the suit points out that the state Legislature in 2003 passed a bill quite similar to this one: making bookstores liable for displayed materials that minors could see, and that, in 2004, then-District Judge G of the United States. Thomas Eisele declared key sections unconstitutional.
Cultural law is not new. Neither does the US Constitution. Most of these kinds of problems have come up before. The only variant is the political power at the time, and the effect of that political power on the types of judges you get.
Eisele was generally considered a Rockefeller Republican. There are no more.
Freedom is freedom. But the fleeting definition of this depends on the prevailing politics.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his Twitter feed @johnbrummett.
