Six months after 12 families, including Kentuckians, sued the federal government over library book removals at Fort Campbell and other Department of Defense schools, a federal judge ruled Monday that the books must be restored.
U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles in the Eastern District of Virginia also ruled that the defendants — Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Beth Schiavano-Narvaez, director of Department of Defense Activity (DoDEA) — cannot further remove books in efforts to implement Pres. Donald Trump’s executive orders related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
The ruling is limited to the five schools attended by plaintiffs, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, which joined in the lawsuit on behalf of the families. The Lantern has asked DoDEA for comment on the ruling.
Giles, appointed by President Joe Biden, found that school libraries are not exempt from First Amendment protections and furthermore “lack the quintessential elements of government speech.”
“Defendants attempt to circumvent the First Amendment entirely by asserting that the removal of books from DoDEA libraries constitutes government speech,” Giles wrote. “Defendants contend that as DoDEA’s speech, library curation is exempt from the First Amendment. The Court is unpersuaded.”
It’s “doubtful” that either the public or students “perceives the books in school libraries as conveying a government message,” Giles wrote.
The government speech doctrine, established by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1990s, allows the government, through its own speech, to discriminate on the basis of content or viewpoint on the theory that the First Amendment does not apply when the government speaks, according to Middle Tennessee State University’s Free Speech Center.
‘Censorship, plain and simple.’
The ACLU of Kentucky said the removed items included reading on slavery, Native American history, women’s history, LGBTQ issues and history, preventing sexual harassment and abuse and parts of the Advanced Placement (AP) psychology curriculum.
“Libraries are intended to provide a breadth of information to students, and like with government speech, it strains credulity that the curation of a library collection would bear the school’s imprimatur,” Giles wrote in her opinion.
Kentucky students were part of the April federal lawsuit challenging U.S. Department of Defense policies that led to schools at Fort Campbell and other military bases removing books about slavery and civil rights.
One of the plaintiffs, a Kentucky mother, said at the time that she wanted her children to have access to a wide range of books so they could better understand the world and other people.
Corey Shapiro, legal director for the ACLU of Kentucky, said that the book removals were “censorship, plain and simple.”
Giles pointed to federal politics, citing Trump, who told Congress on March 6 “we’re getting wokeness out of our schools and out of our military.”
“The record is clear that by removing books, Defendants intended to deny Plaintiffs access to ideas that they, by virtue of the Presidential EOs, found distasteful, ‘radical’ or ‘divisive,’” and not by the educational qualities of the books,” Giles wrote.
The ACLU’s Shapiro said in a statement: “The materials removed are clearly age-appropriate and are only offensive to those who are afraid of a free-thinking population.”
This article is republished under a Creative Commons license from Kentucky Lantern, which is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and Twitter.
Sarah Ladd is a Louisville-based journalist and Kentuckian. She has covered everything from crime to higher education. In 2020, she started reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic and has covered health ever since.
