{"id":174917,"date":"2025-10-02T10:25:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T10:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/174917\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T10:25:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T10:25:09","slug":"florida-court-rejects-free-speech-argument-in-book-removal-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/174917\/","title":{"rendered":"Florida Court Rejects Free Speech Argument in Book Removal Case"},"content":{"rendered":"

A district court in Florida on Monday ruled that the Escambia County school board had not violated the First Amendment rights of students or authors when it removed a children\u2019s book from its school libraries called \u201cAnd Tango Makes Three,\u201d which is about two gay male penguins raising a penguin chick.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit was brought by the picture book\u2019s authors, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, and an elementary school student who was identified by the initials B.G. The suit maintained that Escambia removed the book because it disagreed with its viewpoint, a decision which infringed on their free speech rights.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no dispute,\u201d the plaintiffs said in a court filing, that the book was removed \u201cbecause \u2018Tango\u2019 depicts a same-sex relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n

As restrictions on books in public schools and school libraries have skyrocketed<\/a> over the past few years, \u201cTango\u201d has been a common target.<\/p>\n

In it, a zookeeper notices that two male penguins have paired off and built a nest together. \u201cThey must be in love,\u201d the zookeeper thinks. When the two penguins put an egg-shaped rock in their nest and start sitting on it like all the other penguin couples do, the zookeeper replaces it with a real egg that needs to be cared for. That egg becomes Tango.<\/p>\n

The book \u201cillustrates that same-sex parents exist, that they can adopt and raise offspring, and have happy and healthy families,\u201d the plaintiffs maintained.<\/p>\n

In its defense, Escambia said that a library collection was a form of government speech, which meant it was entitled to curate the collection as it saw fit, and that the authors did not have a right to have their book included. Escambia also argued that the plaintiffs could not prove the board removed the book based on viewpoint discrimination.<\/p>\n

Judge Allen Winsor, of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida, ruled in Escambia\u2019s favor, but leaned on a different argument. He said that a school library is not a public forum for expressing opinions, so the author\u2019s First Amendment rights were not violated. Removing the book from its collection also did not keep it from the student who sued, the judge said, because the student could still buy the book or borrow it from a friend.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe good news is I need not decide the difficult government-speech issue to resolve the case,\u201d the judge wrote. \u201cEither way, the First Amendment offers Plaintiffs no protection.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his opinion, the judge looked to, and often quoted from, a case recently decided<\/a> in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Little v. Llano County, which focused on the removal of books from public libraries.<\/p>\n

In that case, a plurality of judges decided that Llano County\u2019s action constituted government speech, but a majority said the County\u2019s decision could not be challenged on First Amendment grounds. That case has been appealed to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

Lauren Zimmerman, a partner at Selendy Gay, the law firm representing the plaintiffs, said the ruling \u201cstands for the idea that the First Amendment does not apply to government censorship in a library. We think that\u2019s wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Escambia County School Board did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A district court in Florida on Monday ruled that the Escambia County school board had not violated the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174918,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[78197,457,9105,96,78193,78192,78196,78191,78194,78195,65632,56,54,55,9107],"class_list":{"0":"post-174917","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-and-tango-makes-three-book","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-books-and-literature","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-first-amendment-us-constitution","13":"tag-freedom-of-speech-and-expression","14":"tag-justin-1963","15":"tag-libraries-and-librarians","16":"tag-parnell","17":"tag-peter","18":"tag-richardson","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom","21":"tag-unitedkingdom","22":"tag-writing-and-writers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}