GOP Governor Ron DeSantis often talks about what he calls “the free state of Florida” but Florida Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody has declared the Sunshine State’s public schools, including its libraries, do not exist to promote the free exchange of ideas, but rather, to “convey the government’s message.”
In a legal brief, the State of Florida argues it has a First Amendment right to remove LGBTQ books, or any book, from public schools and libraries, USA Today’s Tallahassee Democrat reports.
“It’s a contention that First Amendment experts and advocates call extreme and chilling. But the state maintains the books on school shelves represent protected government speech. Public school libraries are ‘a forum for government speech,’ it says, not a ‘forum for free expression.'”
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“Public-school systems, including their libraries, convey the government’s message,” Attorney General Moody (photo) also wrote in the legal brief.
“Like the selection of monuments,,” Moody writes, quoting a legal case: “the government speaks through its selection of which books to put on the shelves and which books to exclude.”
She also argues that the “purpose” of public school libraries “is to support the government’s educational mission.”
Moody also cites the very narrow recent anti-LGBTQ Supreme Court ruling in 303 Creative that was riddled with falsehoods.
Florida’s First Amendment stance has experts calling the State’s claims “authoritarianism.”
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“There’s considerable irony in that those who seek to limit access to books in school libraries often say they’re fighting for parental rights,” Ken Paulson, the director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, told the Tallahassee Democrat. “If government speech determines what books can be in the library, the government is essentially saying your children can only see the ideas that the government has approved.”
“That’s not parental rights,” he added. “That’s authoritarianism.”
NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the well-known scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders, called it “straight-up authoritarianism.”