In yet another major win for freedom to read advocates, a federal judge has ordered the Crawford County Public Library in Arkansas to stop segregating books deemed inappropriate by some local residents into special “social sections,” and to return the books to general circulation.
In his September 30 opinion and order, U.S. district court judge P.K. Holmes III held that “it is indisputable” that the creation and maintenance of the library’s so-called social sections “was motivated in substantial part by a desire to impede users’ access to books containing viewpoints that are unpopular or controversial in Crawford County.” In a preliminary injunction, Holmes ordered county officials to dismantle the sections and return the books to general circulation, as well as to refrain from “coercing” library staff to censor books.
The decision comes in a lawsuit first filed in May 2023 by three local parents, who challenged the county’s quorum court, the library board, and the library’s interim director for a policy that created special sections and classifications for segregating books, mostly LGBTQ content. Among their defenses, county officials argued that moving the books to special sections did not amount to book banning. But Holmes said the evidence showed that “viewpoint discrimination was a substantial motive" for the creation of the “social sections,” and that the policy held “profound” First Amendment implications.
“The 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,” Holmes found. “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.”
Notably, Holmes’s decision cites a recent appeals court decision over Iowa's controversial book banning law, SF 496 in rejecting the County's defense that books placed on library shelves are “government speech” and thus outside the reach of the plaintiff’s first Amendment claims—a controversial argument that is now before the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in another closely-watched book banning case, Little v. Llano County.
“Defendants argue that creation and maintenance of the social section amounts to ‘government speech,’ and that therefore no First Amendment violation has occurred,” the decision states. “However, the Supreme Court has not extended that doctrine to the placement and removal of books in libraries, and the Eighth Circuit has very recently declined to do so as well.”
County officials told local reporters that they are unlikely to appeal the decision, given that many of the same issues are currently part of another high profile lawsuit in the state—which includes authors and publishers as plaintiffs—that has challenged provisions of the state’s controversial “harmful to minors” law, Act 372. In an emphatic ruling issued on July 29, 2023, federal judge Timothy L. Brooks blocked parts of that law, but a trial on the merits is now scheduled to begin in December.
