The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has ruled that, "Texas it cannot ban books for mentioning ‘butt and fart’."
The ruling is a bit more complex than that, a more precise description is that governments cannot remove books from libraries because they disagree with those books, but the headline is great:
An appellate court has ruled that Texas cannot ban books from libraries simply because they mention “butt and fart” and other content which some state officials may dislike.
The fifth US circuit court of appeals issued its decision on Thursday in a 76-page majority opinion, which was written by Judge Jacques Wiener Jr and opened with a quote from American poet Walt Whitman: “The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book.”
In its decision, the appellate court declared that “government actors may not remove books from a public library with the intent to deprive patrons of access to ideas with which they disagree”.
It added: “This court has declared that officials may not ‘remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the idea contained in those books and seek by their removal to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.”
Among the books banned by Llano County were I Broke My Butt! and Larry the Farting Leprechaun.
But think of the children!
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