The American Civil Liberties Union and several other organizations filed briefs Tuesday in an ongoing lawsuit over books removed from the Llano County library.
The ACLU said Llano County’s removal of 17 books from their public library in 2021 was politically motivated. They argue that allowing government officials to order librarians to remove books based on viewpoint amounts to censorship.
“If courts allow government officials to pull books out of public libraries in order to impose a government-approved set of views, they're opening a Pandora's box of censorship,” said Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
Leila Green Little and six other library patrons sued county officials over the book removals in 2022. A district court judge ruled in their favor in 2023, but Llano appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
A three judge-panel largely affirmed the ruling earlier this summer. But Llano officials petitioned for a rehearing of the case before the entire appeals court. That hearing is scheduled for September 24.
“In this case Texas and other states are asking the Fifth Circuit to allow politicians to freely censor books they dislike with no constitutional limit. We urge the court to reject that dangerous position," said Adriana Piñon, legal director of the ACLU of Texas. "Our public libraries should reflect the voices and identities of every person in our state, and not just the beliefs of certain state politicians.”
Texas and 17 other states filed a joint brief in support of Llano County officials in August, arguing that the decision to remove the library books was government speech protected by the First Amendment, not a violation of library patrons' First Amendment rights.
"The Court should reject the district court’s decision to countermand the county’s discretion in managing the content of its public libraries, thereby turning a matter historically left to local democratic process into a federal issue settled by lawyers and judges in courtrooms far removed from the community the relevant library was created to serve," the brief signed by 18 state attorneys general said.
Some of the titles initially removed from the Llano Library system included It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health by Robbie H. Harris; They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group by Susan Campbell Bartoletti; and Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen by Jazz Jennings.
The American Library Association reported a record number of attempted book bans in 2023.
In addition to the ACLU, the Association of American Publishers, the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Texas Freedom to Read Project also filed amicus briefs Tuesday in support of the library patrons who filed the original lawsuit.
