Idaho sued for a law that pushed libraries to go “adults only”

Parents, students, and private schools and libraries are suing the state of Idaho for a law that they say infringes on their First Amendment free speech rights and Fourteenth Amendment due process rights.

H.B. 710, which took effect in early July, allows citizens and government officials to file lawsuits against schools and libraries that do not move books with “adult content” into “adult only” sections within 60 days of receiving a complaint.

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H.B. 710 is doesn’t offer any concrete guidelines, saying that “obscene content” will be “Judged by the average person, applying contemporary community standards.”

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The law has forced some libraries to go “adult only.” A library in rural Idaho, which lacks the square footage to comply with state standards separating children and adults books, simply said that children are not allowed in at all. The library fears that if it were hit with a lawsuit, it would be bankrupted, and all programming would have to end.

“H.B. 710 is the product of a social climate in Idaho (and elsewhere) in which schools and libraries have been inaccurately and unfairly castigated and villainized for using and making available constitutionally protected materials with content that the state and some Idahoans disapprove of,” the plaintiffs say in the 57-page complaint.

Sun Valley Community School and Foothills School of Arts and Sciences, two private schools, as well as a privately-funded public library called Community Library Association and  Collister United Methodist Church, a lending library, brought the suit forward.

Two high schoolers are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit. They say they want the law to be struck down because they wish to access “harmful” books to further their education.

The high school plaintiffs said that they feel the law is hindering their education. “The Act encompasses works of significant cultural, historical, literary and scientific import that are central to an informed education.”

“Indeed, the broad language of the Act subjects the Private Entity Plaintiffs to suit for providing minors with health education textbooks, images of canonical works of art like Michelangelo’s David, significant works of literature like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and even the Bible, if a Defendant or citizen complainant subjectively believes members of their community would find them offensive,” the complaint states.

“The Constitution does not permit the State to engage in content-based censorship to mollify a community’s most sensitive and censorious members.”

“The act’s vague and overbroad definition of ‘harmful to minors’ conflicts with decades of settled constitutional law and extends well beyond the state’s limited authority to restrict the materials that private parties, like the private entity plaintiffs, may provide to minors,” they write in the lawsuit.

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