Federal Appeals Court Rules That the First Amendment Does NOT Force Public Libraries To Carry Pornography or Inappropriate Content

For over a year, the ACLJ has been fighting to protect children from far-Left groups that want to expose children to sexually explicit content without your knowledge. School districts have been inundated with far-Left lobbying, demands, and lawsuits seeking to force them to include reprehensible and disturbing content in the children’s sections of school libraries. We’ve been working with school districts around the country to fight back and allow school officials – who represent the parents of the school children they serve – to empower parental rights and protect children from sexualized and Marxist indoctrination. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals just issued a decision that will assist us in this fight.

In an unprecedented decision, Little v. Llano County, the Fifth Circuit made two very important findings: “First, [individuals and groups] 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.”

This means that school libraries cannot be forced to house inappropriate material no matter how many lawsuits radical librarians and far-Left groups like the ACLU file.

The lawsuit was initiated by citizens of Llano County, who sued their library in Texas for removing 17 books because of their sexual and/or racial themes. The plaintiffs in this case argued that they had a “right to receive information” – even sexually explicit information – under the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment and that the public library (and taxpayers) must supply them with whatever books they desire. The plaintiffs disingenuously argued that the removal of the inappropriate books constituted a book ban reminiscent of “totalitarian regimes.” One amicus brief filed in support of the plaintiffs even ridiculously suggested, “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people.” We have seen this same over-the-top rhetoric in some of our prior cases.

Fortunately, the Fifth Circuit quickly rejected these claims as “over-caffeinated arguments” and urged everyone to “take a deep breath. . . . No one is banning (or burning) books.” The court further noted:

If a disappointed patron can’t find a book in the library, he can order it online, buy it from a bookstore, or borrow it from a friend. All that Llano County has done here is what libraries have been doing for two centuries: decide which books they want in their collections. This is what it means to be a library – to make judgments about which books are worth reading and which are not, which ideas belong on the shelves and which do not.

The Fifth Circuit’s ruling is a breath of fresh air and represents a long, overdue, legally sound, and commonsense approach to this issue. As the Fifth Circuit noted, the plaintiffs incorrectly “demand to receive information from the government itself.” The Fifth Circuit went on to explain:

It is one thing to tell the government it cannot stop you from receiving a book. The First Amendment protects your right to do that. It is another thing for you to tell the government which books it must keep in the library. The First Amendment does not give you that right to demand that.

If – as the groups we’ve battled have been arguing – “[P]eople can challenge which books libraries remove, they can challenge which books libraries buy. . . . Suppose a patron complains that the library does not have a book she wants. The library refuses to buy it, so she sues.” Where would it end? It wouldn’t, and groups like the ACLU wouldn’t stop until you, the taxpayer, are forced to fund and stock pornography and other inappropriate content on every children’s library shelf in America.

The Fifth Circuit’s ruling in Little v. Llano County has profound implications for the interpretation of free speech in public libraries and the scope of governmental authority in content regulation. The decision reinforces the principle that the First Amendment prohibits government censorship but does not obligate the government to provide access to specific viewpoints or materials – especially when those materials are sexually explicit or otherwise inappropriate for children.