Midwest Chick's Place

The Eighth Circuit Court just sided with Iowa regarding their law that requires that books in school be ‘age appropriate’.

Specifically:

Senate File 496 explicitly refers to books with “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” and says school libraries cannot hand them out to kids.

One would think that this would be a no-brainer. But several publishing houses took this law to court maybe because most of what they are selling has this type of content and if they can’t sell it to schools, they lose a lot of income.

But here’s the thing. School libraries are funded by the taxpayers. Your money, my money. And keeping people from paying for something with which they don’t agree is not ‘abridging freedom of speech’, just the same as forcing someone to pay for something with which they don’t agree is upholding freedom of speech.

The court further ruled that children do not have a right to read certain books in schools, and this does not amount to a book ban.

“The First Amendment does not guarantee students the right to access books of their choosing at taxpayer expense,” the ruling stated, citing case precedents.

If parents wish for their children to access these types of books, they can pay for them out of their own pocket.

I think that Penguin Random House is on the wrong side of this fight and that they need to back off. They could easily create curated selections of age appropriate books for school libraries and market them without having to go 50 Shades route.