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.

  • humorlessrepost@lemmy.world
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    27 days ago

    They’re not banning you from selling, buying, owning, or reading the book, so it’s not an obvious first amendment issue.

    They’re creating policies for which books various government institutions can use tax money to buy and make available.

    They just happen to be targeting books that recognize the existence of minorities, which is shitty.

      • humorlessrepost@lemmy.world
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        26 days ago

        This is a school district not renting space at the school to a non-profit that intends to distribute the books. That’s a problem. The same thing happened to the after school Satan club. But framing it as “banning you from owning those books” doesn’t seem honest.

        It’s plenty bad when publicly owned rental space is denied to some renters based on viewpoint discrimination. I hope they win their lawsuit. There’s no need to equate it with police raiding houses to confiscate books and arresting bookstore owners.

  • radix@lemmy.world
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    27 days ago

    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.