A school board in Colorado cannot remove sexually explicit, profane, and “transgender” books from school libraries because the school board is conservative, according to a federal judge touted as the first openly lesbian judge west of the Mississippi.
The ACLU’s Colorado chapter filed a suit on behalf of two minors, the NAACP Wyoming State Area Conference, and the Authors Guild, claiming that the school district engaged in viewpoint discrimination when removing the books. The judge granted a preliminary injunction in March, forcing the Elizabeth School District (in Elizabeth, a suburb southeast of Denver) to restore the books.
Judge Charlotte Sweeney second-guessed the school district’s objections to the books’ contents, calling the objections “pretexual” and condemning the removals as partisan because school board members had discussed following their conservative convictions when debating the removal of the books.
“Other than pretextual declarations, at this stage, there simply is no reason to believe that the books were removed because of vulgarity, age-inappropriateness, or for legitimate pedagogical [teaching] concerns; the board’s own emails strongly suggest that the book removal was motivated by the directors’ ‘commitment to conservative values,’” Swe ...
