A federal judge has struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing so-called “harmful” materials to minors.

A federal judge on Monday struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks found that elements of the law are unconstitutional.

  • FlashMobOfOneEnglish
    21•3 days ago

    This is why I can’t take the free speech crowd seriously.

    They want to be able to say everything they want… and censor public sources of information too?

    • @[email protected]English
      20•3 days ago

      They’re Nazis, they don’t consider anyone else citizens or people for that matter. In their head, everyone not them worships Satan and should be killed.

      So yeah, freedom of speech for them and no one else because they’re the “only people”.

  • @[email protected]English
    11•3 days ago

    mark my words, this bullshit, or some bullshit just like it, will end up in the supreme court, and freedom of speech will be “interpreted” as “you’re allowed to print whatever we tell you you can print”

    “settled law” just like roe

    also, get ready for “you’re free to practice any religion you want, as long as it’s far right conservative evangelicalism. your tithes are due on the 1st and 15th of every month. a minimum of 25% of your income will do much to ‘save’ you”

  • @halcyoncmdrEnglish
    8•3 days ago

    I don’t understand how things like book bans are constitutional in the first place. Seems to be a direct violation of the first amendment by the government. Written documents are considered speech.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•3 days ago

      They hinge on a few things.

      First, the first amendment doesn’t cover the irredeemably obscene , incitement to imminent lawless action, or things like slander and libel. Free speech isn’t absolute.

      Second, minors don’t have the same first amendment rights as adults. There’s a general agreement that there’s some theoretical manner of content that isn’t suitable for minors because they can’t contextualize it correctly.

      Third, despite the real and increasing threat to freedom of speech in the US, we still have enough protections that what we (correctly) angrily call “book bans” are not what the phrase conjurs in isolation.
      It’s typically the government refusing to endorse or provide the book for biased or political reasons. Bad, but not the government prohibition of speech that the phrase evokes.

      Basically, they gain any traction at all because they’re not banning a book, but asserting that the content of a book is too obscene to give to minors, and then trying to criminalize that.

      It’s preposterous in both principle and application, and particularly monstrous given how they’re being used to target the most vulnerable people, but they’re based off the legal grey area that’s supposed to be filled in by well intentioned reasonable people because the law as written can’t account for every possibility.