The U.S. Supreme Court has let stand a Texas county’s ban of 17 books from its public library system, the Texas Tribune reports.
The court opted not to hear a challenge in the case of Little v. Llano County, in which the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the county, about 80 miles northwest of Austin, to remove the books from its three public libraries.
The books banned by Llano County vary by topic. Two focus on the history of racism: Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s They Called Themselves the KKK: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group. Two others deal with the transgender experience: Jazz Jennings’ Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen and Kristin Elizabeth Clark’s Freakboy. Seven of the books are children’s titles that deal with buttocks and flatulence, including I Broke My Butt!, written by Dawn McMillan and illustrated by Ross Kinnaird, and Larry the Farting Leprechaun, written and illustrated by Jane Bexley.
In its ruling dismissing the First Amendment challenge to the removals, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote, “First, plaintiffs cannot invoke a right to receive information to challenge a library’s removal of books….Second, a library’s collection decisions are government speech and therefore not subject to Free Speech challenge.”
The literary nonprofit group PEN America said in a statement, “The Llano decision has already been used to uphold the devastating wave of book bans across the country. Leaving the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in place erodes the most elemental principles of free speech and allows state and local governments to exert ideological control over the people with impunity. The government has no place telling people what they can and cannot read.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
