The “social section” in Crawford County Library’s Van Buren branch (Screenshot from court documents)
A federal judge on Monday ordered Crawford County officials to stop placing certain library materials, mostly on LGBTQ+ themes, in a separate section with color labels.
U.S. District Judge P.K. Holmes III ordered the defendants to move the materials in those sections to “appropriate sections in general circulation without consideration of whether they approve or agree with the viewpoints expressed in such materials, and without consideration of whether the viewpoints expressed in such materials are unpopular or controversial.”
Holmes further ordered county officials “to refrain from coercing Crawford County Library System staff into acting inconsistently with this injunction.”
CRAWFORD CO. INJUNCTION 09.30.24
Crawford County residents and library patrons Rebecka Virden, Nina Prater, Samantha Rowlett and their minor children filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas in May 2023 against the county judge, quorum court, library board and interim library director. The plaintiffs alleged “unlawful censorship of materials,” specifically children’s books with LGBTQ+ topics. Their lawsuit objected to “the stigmatization of certain books by placing a prominent color label on them and moving the books to a separate ‘social section’” in each library.
Crawford County is also a defendant in another federal lawsuit filed last year over Act 372 of 2023, which would change how libraries decide to remove materials from circulation. The law also would criminalize librarians’ decisions about materials. The case is set for trial this month.
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In a 10-page ruling issued Monday evening, Holmes said “it is indisputable that the creation and maintenance of the social section was motivated in substantial part by a desire to impede users’ access to books containing viewpoints that are unpopular or controversial in Crawford County.”
Such viewpoint discrimination has “profound First Amendment implications,” the judge wrote. One of the bedrock principles underlying the U.S. Constitution’s free speech provision “is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” he added.
Holmes acknowledged that viewpoint discrimination wasn’t the only motivation for creating the social sections, noting that evidence suggested some officials were concerned that children might find their way to sexually explicit materials intended for adults.
Public libraries do have a right to restrict minors’ access to material that isn’t age-appropriate, but those restrictions must be content-based and viewpoint neutral, Holmes wrote.
“It is one thing to restrict minors’ access to sexually explicit material, but a very different thing to restrict minors’ access to unpopular opinions,” the judge said. “Here, the undisputed evidence shows that the social section was created not only for the former purpose but also for the latter, which violates the First Amendment.”
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Holmes also wrote that the defendants failed to support their argument that the government had an interest in creating a separate section for the LGBTQ-themed materials that outweighed the plaintiffs’ right to receive information.
“[S]uppressing ideas or opinions on the grounds that ‘certain elements of populace object’ to them is not a legitimate governmental interest at all,” Holmes said.
The judge also dismissed the county’s argument that libraries are not obligated to provide access to all information.
“[T]he issue here is not whether public libraries have an obligation to provide Plaintiffs with access to all conceivable ideas and opinions; they don’t, and indeed that would be practically impossible. Rather, the issue is whether public libraries have an obligation not to stigmatize disfavored viewpoints that are already in their collection. And as already discussed above, they do,” Holmes wrote.
He also disagreed with the county’s position that creating the social sections amounted to “government speech,” which the Supreme Court has ruled is not required to be viewpoint-neutral.
The Supreme Court “has not extended that doctrine to the placement and removal of books in libraries,” and the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose territory includes Arkansas, “very recently declined to do so as well,” Holmes said.
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