Religious extremists who are determined to use their beliefs to control what we can read, see and experience, won’t stop at trying to censor books in public school libraries and public libraries. They’re coming after bookstores, too.
Thankfully, they’ve been stopped in Arkansas, where a federal judge recently struck down the censors’ latest overreach.
The roots of the case go back to late March of 2023 when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) signed legislation known as Act 372 into law. Two provisions in the law would have penalized booksellers with up to a year in prison for making available anything deemed “harmful to minors.”
A vague standard like that is very dangerous, with the clear intent of the law being to give state officials a powerful weapon to use to harass and intimidate bookstores for selling legal material that extremists decide they don’t like for whatever reason. A few months after Huckabee signed the law, a coalition of librarians, booksellers and citizens filed a lawsuit in federal court, aided by the nonprofit Democracy Forward.
In July 2023, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks temporarily blocked the provisions in the law from going into effect. On Dec. 23, 2024, Brooks permanently barred those sections from being enforced, calling them unconstitutional.
“If the General Assembly’s purpose in passing Section 1 was to protect younger minors from accessing inappropriate sexual content in libraries and bookstores, the law will only achieve that end at the expense of everyone else’s First Amendment rights,” Brooks observed. “The law deputizes librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship; when motivated by the fear of jail time, it is likely they will shelve only books fit for young children and segregate or discard the rest.”
Ron Charles, a book critic at The Washington Post, noted that Brooks pointed out that defenders of the law were asking the people of Arkansas “to trust the local governing bodies evaluating book challenges” and not worry about “arbitrary prosecution.”
Charles then asked a compelling question: “But why, we might wonder, should a free people have to put their access to books in the clammy hands of state authorities and radicalized bigots who presume to know what’s in everyone else’s best interest?”
Why indeed? We know exactly what Arkansas’ lawmakers were trying to do: restrict the flow of information and control what the people of that state could read. And they were prodded to do it by Christian Nationalist extremists who fear certain ideas.
Brooks’ decisions will be appealed, and we can hope it survives at the higher court. For now, let’s celebrate another win for the freedom to learn.
