Residents in Llano County, Texas, are suing county officials for violating their first amendment rights by removing books from public libraries, according to ABC News.
“Public libraries are not places of government indoctrination,” the lawsuit filed Monday reads. “They are not places where the people in power can dictate what their citizens are permitted to read about and learn. When government actors target public library books because they disagree with and intend to suppress the ideas contained within them, it jeopardizes the freedoms of everyone.”
Residents say county officials terminated access to over 17,000 digital books and also removed some award-winning books from shelves due to their content.
Some of the books that have been removed from libraries include works about oppression and racism like “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” by journalist Isabel Wilkerson, and “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti.
Some children’s books were also removed as well, including Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen” is about a boy’s dream of making a cake, and Robie H. Harris’s “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health” is a sex education book about the biology of the human body, ABC reports.
The lawsuit also claims that one librarian was fired after refusing to remove books from the shelf.
“Though Plaintiffs differ in their ages, professions, and individual religious and political beliefs, they are fiercely united in their love for reading public library books and in their belief that the government cannot dictate which books they can and cannot read,” the lawsuit read.
