Conservative-dominated court restores books denounced by officials as ‘pornographic filth’ to school libraries

An appellate court has ruled that Texas cannot ban books from libraries simply because they mention “butt and fart” and other content which some state officials may dislike.

The fifth US circuit court of appeals issued its decision on Thursday in a 76-page majority opinion, which was written by Judge Jacques Wiener Jr and opened with a quote from American poet Walt Whitman: “The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book.”

In its decision, the appellate court declared that “government actors may not remove books from a public library with the intent to deprive patrons of access to ideas with which they disagree”.

  • @[email protected]
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    1711 months ago

    Unfortunately, we know how this is going to go: “If you won’t let us ban books from the library, we’ll just ban the library.”

    • @[email protected]
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      811 months ago

      Already happening in some places. Local governments are cutting library funding because they don’t like the some of the content that their libraries are stocking, but the courts won’t let them ban it all.

      • bitwolf
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        11 months ago

        Time to open private non-profit libraries, offer classes on social tolerance and apply for public grants?

    • @[email protected]
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      1611 months ago

      These are the same people who tried to get Mr Rogers taken off the air and tried to shut down PBS entirely.

      I think the average city-American doesn’t fully appreciate how backwards most of our country really is. As someone who grew up in the rural outskirts I can tell stories of the people and communities and attitudes that would probably be shocking to many people, but there are so many people like this that they have significant power over our land. We have to be a lot better about enforcing education in our country, we need to bring the morons back up out of the dark-ages, because there are a fucking LOT of dark-age imbeciles across the US shaping policy for all of us and most of the time they run unchallenged because everyone just fixates on presidential elections every four years and nothing else.

      • @[email protected]
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        311 months ago

        Sadly they slowly dismantle public education at every turn. I’d be curious to see the uptick in the past 40 years of homeschooling, particularly those doing so for religious reasons.

        • TurtleJoe
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          111 months ago

          It’s not the last 40 years, it’s been since Civil Rights legislation and the Brown vs Board decision.

  • @[email protected]
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    811 months ago

    Butts make funny noises when you pass gas. Babies laugh at it. They have no idea what’s going on at all 95% of the time, but they get that farts are funny.

  • dohpaz42
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    13411 months ago

    And these old farts are complaining about how “soft” today’s youth are? They really need to get their heads out of their butts.

  • Norgur
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    1511 months ago

    Anyone else thinking that this Judge would have gotten his autobiography banned for profanity just for the name?

  • sp3ctr4l
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    11 months ago

    The Bible describes God showing Moses his ‘backside’, which a number of actual scholars interpret as including his butt.

    Not sure about farts in the Bible, but there’s stories about rape, incest, at one point a description of men with ‘emission like donkeys’, ie, huge cum loads from big dicks.

    They seem to never learn that if you try to ban ‘pornographic’ text, you’ll have to ban the Bible as well.

    • @[email protected]
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      911 months ago

      Nuh uh. I swored on the bi-bull three times. That ain’t in there. I never heard my preacher say that and all he ever talked about was the bi-bull.

  • @[email protected]
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    4511 months ago

    Imagine being all worked up about books mentioning raging obscenities like ‘butt’ and ‘fart’, only to get slapped in the face by Judge ‘Wiener’. 😂

    • @[email protected]
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      411 months ago

      Imagine having that much of an issue with barely offensive words that their kids will never read because most don’t use the school library anyway.

      And imagine letting your kids come home and access whatever media they want including actual pornography on the internet. Most of these parents have zero clue how to block internet sites on their home computers and laptops let alone the phones that their kids all have.

      But of course, that’s another problem some parents are asking the government to solve by forcing porn sites to require visitors to affirmatively identify themselves and their age. Of course, that only applies to the major porn sites that play by the arbitrary rules anyway. All so stupid.

  • TooManyFoods
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    2911 months ago

    The desenting opinion called the court the “library police” for refusing to let the state police the library.

  • @[email protected]
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    2611 months ago

    Good. Fuck Butt Fart Texas. Books should not be censored for words. I remember a teacher in maybe 7th grade reading a book outloud with the word fuck in it, and he just said it and kept reading, he.knew the book well. I gained a lot of respect for that teacher and listened to him because I felt like he wasn’t going to censor what he taught us.

    • @[email protected]
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      811 months ago

      Good teacher. Authors choose their words intentionally. I’m guessing “fudging”, “friggen”, and “ducking” (thanks iPhone) are not great replacements for the subject matter.

  • @[email protected]
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    1611 months ago

    Btw, I absolutely ADORE that the acronym for the system used by libraries to weed out old books is MUSTIE 😆❤️

      • @[email protected]
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        11 months ago

        Llano County applies the “MUSTIE” factors in weeding books, as recommended by experts in the field, under which a book is evaluated for whether it is (1) “Misleading and/or factually inaccurate,” (2) “Ugly (worn out beyond mending or rebinding),” (3) “Superseded by a new edition or a better source,” (4) “Trivial (of no discernable literary or scientific merit),” (5) “Irrelevant to the needs and interests of the community,” or (6) “Elsewhere (the material may be easily borrowed from another source).”

  • @[email protected]
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    1311 months ago

    what, trying to equate “butt” and “fart” with porn didn’t work?

    -moron GOP who think everyone is as dumb as they are

  • @[email protected]
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    111 months ago

    So kids, as we know now, our ancestors, the hominids that came before us, they all had big butts apparently. Ha! I said butts! Now they can’t ban my book on evolution!