This week is marks the 30th anniversary of Banned Books Week, an annual event that celebrates the freedom to read and calls attention to the wealth of creative expression that is stifled when books can be barred from library shelves. The ACLU has always believed that our country functions best when citizens exercise their right to freely explore the world around them, and, we’ll be blogging about banned books and censorship all week. Join the conversation using .
Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.
– President Dwight D. Eisenhower, commencement address at Dartmouth College, June 14, 1953
Seventeen years ago this week, cooperating lawyers recruited by the were doing battle for the First Amendment in a major trial over the Olathe, Kansas School District’s removal of Nancy Garden’s award-winning young adult novel from all of the District’s school libraries. Annie on My Mind depicts a fictional romantic relationship between two teenage girls. After a four-day bench trial, a federal district judge ruled that the Superintendent and the members of the Board of Education had removed the novel from the school libraries “because they disagreed with ideas expressed in the book and . . . [thus] intended to deny students in the Olathe School District access to those ideas.” (You can read the opinion in that case – Case v. Unified School Dist. No. 233, 908 F.Supp. 864, 876 (D. Kan. 1995) – ). The court’s decision was a ringing victory for the First Amendment rights of students to receive diverse ideas and information free from the clutches of censorious school officials.
Since then, the ACLU of Kansas & Western Missouri has fought library censorship on a regular basis with mixed results. For instance, in 2005, we encouraged the Blue Valley School District’s Board of Education (in suburban Kansas City) to reject a parent group’s petition to remove the following fourteen acclaimed books from the District’s curriculum: , , , , , , , , , , One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, , , and This Boy’s Life. In August 2005, the District announced that it would keep in the curriculum and would keep all of the books in its school libraries. Based on a District curriculum review process, school officials decided to drop Tobias Wolff’s This Boy's Life and Walter Dean Myers’ Fallen Angels because a review committee decided they were no longer the best fit for the curriculum. Although the parent group had challenged all of the books based on claims of “indecency,” the District’s director of curriculum and instruction said that no titles were removed because of violence, language, or sexual content.
In the last couple of years, we have tried but failed to stop efforts to remove books from school libraries in Stockton and Republic, Missouri. In both cases, the censors successfully advocated for removals of acclaimed literary works based on selective readings of the “dirty parts.”
In 2010, the Stockton School Board to remove Sherman Alexie’s award-winning novel, , because its teenage protagonist was dealing with his parents’ alcoholism on an Indian Reservation in Eastern Washington and with his own sexual awakening. The book offers positive messages of personal responsibility and resisting peer pressure, but those positive themes could not withstand the censors’ shrieks of outrage based on out-of-context quotations of the novel’s allegedly salacious details. Although we were interested in litigating the removal of the Alexi novel, the parents and teachers who spoke up against removal before the vote feared retaliation and would not agree to act as plaintiffs in a lawsuit against this rural school district.
Last year at this time, we – along with many coalition partners – were engaged in a heated battle to try to stop the Republic School Board from removing Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Sarah Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer from the high school curriculum and library. The Board eventually from the high school’s curriculum and library in response to complaints filed by Wesley Scroggins, a local resident and Missouri State University business professor. In published in the Springfield News-Leader after the removal of Slaughterhouse-Five but before the removal of Twenty Boy Summer, Scroggins explained that he objected to Slaughterhouse-Five because it “contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame,” and to Twenty Boy Summer because of its sexual content. Scroggins advocated additional removals of books with these closing words: “How can Christian men and women expose children to such immorality? Parents, it is time you get involved!” Although our coalition’s efforts failed to get the books back in the high school’s library, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library sent 150 copies of the novel to students in the District, and the Republic Public Library reported a waiting list of patrons wanting to read Vonnegut’s great anti-war novel. Thus, the censors may have won the battle, but they lost the war.
And you can be sure that the – as well as ACLU affiliates around the country – will continue to defend the freedom to read for many years to come.
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Press ReleaseDec 2024
Free Speech
National Security
ACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok BanACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok Ban
WASHINGTON — Today, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to block the enforcement of a law that would effectively ban people in America from using TikTok as soon as January 19, 2025. Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected TikTok’s challenge to the law. TikTok has asked the Supreme Court for a temporary injunction to prevent the app from being banned while the court considers whether to take the case, saying that unless the justices intervene, the law will “shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration.” “The Constitution imposes an extraordinarily high bar on this kind of mass censorship,”said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project. “The Supreme Court should take up this important case and protect the rights of millions of Americans to freely express themselves and engage with others around the world.” The brief argues that the D.C. Circuit failed to fully address the law’s profound implications for the First Amendment rights of the 170 million Americans who use TikTok. While the lower court’s decision correctly recognized that the statute triggers First Amendment scrutiny, it barely addressed users’ First Amendment interests in speaking, sharing, and receiving information on the platform. The court also perplexingly attempted to cast the government’s ban on TikTok as a vindication of users’ First Amendment rights, which it is not. The rights groups also explain that the law was intended to suppress certain content and viewpoints that many legislators believe could be amplified on TikTok, including the risk of foreign “propaganda.” But under the First Amendment, the government must meet a very high bar to restrict speech based on concerns about its “motivating ideology” or “perspective,” and the government has not come close to meeting that bar here. “The government should not be able to restrict speech, especially to the extent here, based on guessing about the mere possibility of uncertain future harm,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at EFF. “The Supreme Court should put the TikTok ban on hold while it considers the DC Circuit’s erroneous ruling.” Finally, the brief underscores that the government can’t impose this type of sweeping ban unless it’s necessary to prevent extremely serious and imminent harm to national security. But the government has not provided evidence of impending harm, or evidence that banning TikTok is the only available way to address its concerns. As the brief explains, the D.C. Circuit improperly treated the government’s invocation of “national security” as a trump card and failed to hold the government to its burden. “Restricting citizens’ access to foreign media is a practice that has long been associated with repressive regimes, and we should be very wary of letting the practice take root here,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It would do lasting damage to the First Amendment and our democracy if the Supreme Court let this ban go into effect even temporarily.” You can find the brief online here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A587/335380/20241217144322392_24A587%20TikTok%20v%20Garland%20Amicus%20Brief%20pdfa.pdf -
MississippiJul 2024
Free Speech
Privacy & Technology
NetChoice v. FitchNetChoice v. Fitch
Whether a law that mandates age verification for all users of social media services violates the First Amendment. -
News & CommentaryDec 2024
Free Speech
Can you define pornography? Neither can the government.Can you define pornography? Neither can the government.
We break down the absurd-but-true history of trying to censor sexual speech under the guise of "keeping kids safe." -
Minnesota Supreme CourtNov 2024
Free Speech
Energy Transfer LP v. Greenpeace International, Unicorn RiotEnergy Transfer LP v. Greenpeace International, Unicorn Riot
This case in the Minnesota Supreme Court asks whether the MFFIA's protections apply to newsgatherers even if they are alleged to have engaged in trespassing while newsgathering. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, alongside the ACLU of Minnesota and law firm Biersdorf & Associations, filed a brief representing Unicorn Riot, a media organization that covered protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The brief argues that MFFIA and constitutional reporter’s privileges, under both the U.S. and Minnesota constitutions, protect Unicorn Riot from having to comply with Energy Transfer’s subpoenas.