Forum - View topicNEWS: Judge Declares Texas' Sexual Explicitness Book Rating Law Unconstitutional
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4650 |
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Seems like a reasonable decision to me. If legislators want to pretend like they care about this stuff, the least they can do is put in a bit of work and define what they mean. But, I suspect they realized that would be much easier said than done, hence trying to dump it off on someone else.
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encrypted12345
Posts: 728 |
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I think the issues is that the bill will make third party ratings have direct influence as to what is legal to have in school libraries. In the US, third party ratings do not directly control what can be sold in a store. If a store wanted to sell AO games or NC-17/X rated movies, they could. It's more of a matter of tradition that most stores don't.
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mdo7
 Posts: 6424 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Speaking of Texas, a federal judge has also declared Texas' drag queen ban unconstitutional too. As someone living in Texas. these laws are just ridiculous and several Texas counties have started to ban books late of last year, it got out of control at one point. This is not only happening in Texas, but also in Florida and other part of the United States.
For those of you that are not living in the US, this country's conservatives/hard right wing which is the GOP have started to go after books when it comes to race, and LGBTQ. This has led to somethng called the banned bookmobile delivering banned books to these area, and celebrities/movie stars petitioning and speaking out against book ban: The push to combat DeSantis’ Florida banned book movement Bookmobiles have a new mission: delivering banned books School bus converted into mobile library to protest LGBTQ book bans Plot twist: Activists skirt book bans with guerrilla giveaways and pop-up libraries Julianna Margulies, Shonda Rhimes & Andy Cohen Among Celebrities Supporting ‘Let America Read’ Campaign Amid Book Ban Concerns Ariana Grande, Amanda Gorman and others sign letter against book bans For those of you on ANN that aren't aware of the news, or keep up what's going on I hope you get a better understanding of the situation. If you have any questions about this article, or whatever I just talked about above, you can asked me via private message system, and I'll gladly and do my best to answer them. |
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Blazi
 Posts: 502 |
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Makes sense, too vague of a big bill here.
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druv
Posts: 40 |
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There are a lot of different opinions on what "everyone agrees x is bad" should mean. Is a depiction of child sexual abuse in text that teaches a child how to recognize and protect themselves from sexual abuse automatically banned? Is sexual exploration between two underage teens automatically banned? Is marriage between an adult and a child automatically banned?
If politicians want to set such rules I would want them to demonstrate that books actually cause harm, rather than they feel icky about certain topics. Otherwise school librarians and staff, seeing as how they usually have an education in pedagogy and what not, should generally be trusted to deal with such issues. I do, of course, recognize that a political majority that thinks same-sex relationships are icky can de facto ban such materials (it is a Schmittian world, after all), but I would oppose it. |
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NeverConvex
 Subscriber Posts: 2549 |
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I definitely don't trust Texan legislators not to just go with the Biblical version of this, but I'm not sure I understand rejecting Vaisaga's idea entirely, either, and applying it to both pornography and violence. I mean -- like, a 3rd-grade or even 5th-grade library shouldn't have graphic sex scenes or extreme depictions of violence in it, right?
Although I am pretty doubtful that kind of thing is common anyway, in the absence of evidence. A lot laws of this kind seem to be written to try to drum up support for solving problems that don't exist, and it's not clear to me this is better handled at the level of state legislatures than in a decentralized way through localities and local librarians. |
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Sakura Shinguji
Posts: 199 |
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It's worth keeping in mind that this is right in line with the disingenuous new playbook for certain oppressive legislation being passed or drafted by certain people in Texas and a few other states. If responsibility for enforcing a law is vaguely handed off to an ill-defined third party, then it means any party that might be wronged by that law has no clear recourse, and the lawmakers that passed that law can avoid responsibility. It's not that they don't want to put in the work, they're avoiding it by design. |
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SilverTalon01
Posts: 2419 |
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You have this backwards. They put the work into making it vague enough they could apply to anything they disliked. The only mistake was not having it before the right judge. |
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That Little Rapscallion
Posts: 61 |
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Who exactly would the 'right judge' be? The judge in question who made this decision was a Trump-appointed life-long Republican GOP member. You'd think if this truly was a right-wing plot as some people here are suggesting it would have been a slam dunk to have someone like that making the call for them, but the issue here was the vagueness of it would specifically infringe upon people's first-amendment rights which is something conservatives always love to bring up and the reasoning the judge cited as to why he shot it down. Truth is, challenging and banning books in schools and libraries is a tale as old as time and something both sides of the political spectrum do. I think the topic of what's appropriate for kids to read, especially in a school curriculum, is certainly a discussion worth having, but it's always a hard one to have rationally. It seems like it's become even more so in the past few years than when I was growing up. |
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RenimLS
Posts: 135 Location: North America |
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As others have said, having the law vague is intentional and is right out the playbook of any authoritarian government. Right now the Chinese government for example is considering a law to ban "wearing clothing or bearing symbols in public that are detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese people and hurt the feelings of Chinese people." What does it mean to be "detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese people" or "hurt the feelings of Chinese people"? It doesn't say, because that's the point. The law it designed to let officials arbitrarily decide what does and doesn't count.
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Cryten
 Posts: 1152 |
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It is somewhat of an age old unspoken tradition that nerdier teens have their first exposures to sexual activities from descriptions in books. Often from school libraries. Though mostly the acts of attraction instead of the sexual congress itself. At least until the smart phone age gave most teens access to porn.
I remember my english class having one book with a teen who was an inadequate apprentice to a highly regarded pianist. And it covered his coming of age and sexual awakening. That was in year 10 (Freshmen in America, Fourth Form in UK). How do you define the difference between proper explorations of coming of age and obscene. Anime and Manga itself has that definition problem because it is often about teen sexuality but can go very very into scenes of soft-core pornographic content, or simulated versions. How can any real definition be met that wont offend expression or parents wishing to guard early teens? |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2549 |
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I'm not sure you need to carefully try to define that line, especially at the level of a state legislature? By freshman year of high school it doesn't really feel like there should be a ton of content limitations, in my opinion, outside of whatever choices the local librarian and schoolboard make with parental input. The years that correspond to American middle school feel like the most contentious and hardest to form a reasonable view on. |
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Vanadise
 Posts: 533 |
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Sure, but, serious questions here: 1. Are books with graphic sex scenes or extreme violence in 3rd grade libraries actually a problem? Or is this something that happened once by mistake, or a boogeyman invented by hyper-conservative politicians? 2. Are these laws targeted specifically at preventing that, or will they actually be used by fundamentalist religious organizations to remove books with sexual or violent content from libraries aimed at older students who at the appropriate level to handle it? |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2549 |
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I think I actually spoke to your first question here: Although I am pretty doubtful that kind of thing is common anyway.... And I think I agree with the intent behind your second question, too; in regards to both, I'm very suspicious legislation of this kind would not be used carefully, and is motivated instead by a desire to have broad powers for removing material deemed, essentially, religiously or culturally unacceptable.
This would seem consistent with similar efforts to legislatively rewrite biology textbooks to misteach evolutionary theory, to legislatively advocate for 'religious alternatives' to traditional standardized tests, to wield enforcement powers of the state against families with transgender minors, and so forth. Although, that said, I haven't investigated the specific issue in this thread. If anyone has actual numbers to try to convey how common it is for some reasonable third-party expert group to find "obscene", wildly age-inappropriate content in school libraries, it would be interesting to know what that frequency looks like. |
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recsanime
Posts: 5 |
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Based only on this article
1) Texas does not want sexually explicit books: 50 Shades of Grey, Gender Queer, then select manga. You know, those things. This is a good thing. 2) Texas wanted to force private companies to make the scale and implement it. 3) Judge said, 'no, you can't make a private company do this.' 4) If the state itself wanted to hire people themselves and go through ALL the books in the schools, and do the rating system and look and do the work themselves; Texas can do that. Texas can hire people through the education dept and they can do the scale they see fit for their public schools CONCLUSION: Texas was right in wanting this system. Texas was wrong on the implementation. The Texas govt should do this themselves and not force private companies to do it. |
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