A school district in northeast Florida must put back in libraries three dozen books as part of a settlement reached Thursday with students and parents who sued over what they said was an unlawful decision to limit access to dozens of titles containing LGBTQ+ content.
Under the agreement the School Board of Nassau County must restore access to three dozen titles including “And Tango Makes Three,” a children’s picture book based on a true story about two male penguins that raised a chick together at New York’s Central Park Zoo. Authors Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson were plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the district, which is about 35 miles (about 60 kilometers) northeast of Jacksonville along the Georgia border.
The suit was one of several challenges to book bans since state lawmakers last year passed, and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law, legislation making it easier to challenge educational materials that opponents consider pornographic and obscene. Last month six major publishers and several well-known authors filed a federal lawsuit in Orlando arguing that some provisions of the law violate the First Amendment rights of publishers, authors and students.
The issue is that some laws make complete sense, but you can have an activist judge or the SC declare it unconstitutional. Legislatures are elected and they can’t be expected to know how a law can be interpreted.
Even something as simple as a noise ordinance could be considered a first amendment violation in certain cases.
I live in Illinois, they passed an assault weapons ban last year. Of course the gun people claimed it was unconstitutional because of the 2nd amendment. It’s not but someone tried to make that argument and there’s a non-zero number of judges who would agree with them.
Isn’t that, like, the fucking job? CEOs can’t be expected to know if a given task will lose money for the company. Doesn’t matter if they were put in that position by a popular vote or a board vote
The people who wrote the constitution could have never imagined how it could be interpreted 250 years later.
They also wouldn’t have to worry about losing their seat in the Senate for passing a law that was reinterpreted 250 years later.
Alright, throw the bill onto the vote to re-instated them. Line 1 to re-instated Line 2: Do you think this bill should have passed.
If it gets a majority vote the legislative branch must write a full synopsis and bill to be voted on in the next congressional election (every other year) that would be an amendment to their state Constitution.
It won the popular vote twice, that represents what the people wanted.
Even then, a state constitution can’t override the federal constitution. You would need an amendment at the federal level for every statute that violates it. There’s still laws on the books that were perfectly legal at the time they were passed, but never got repealed. Although I do think that it should be required to repeal laws that are completely unconstitutional such as sundown laws. Some states will pass preemptive laws that are conditional on a change in opinion from the supreme Court.