Sarah Huckabee Sanders Hit With Massive Lawsuit Over Arkansas Book Ban

A coalition of librarians, authors, booksellers, and readers have filed a lawsuit against Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders over her oppressive book ban that she signed into law earlier this year. The ban, similar to those in other states, limits the kinds of materials available to young readers if the conservatives in the state believe that the content is "inappropriate" for that age group. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has only been on the job for a little under half a year at this point, but she is now already being sued by a coalition of librarians, authors, readers, and book sellers for the oppressive and regressive book band that she signed into law earlier this year. Now, the book ban states that public libraries have to remove any objectionable material that children who come into a library may have access to and put it in their adults only section, which as the librarians who filed this lawsuit against Sarah Huckabee Sanders pointed out, we don't have those, right? We don't have a big room in the back that you have to have a key to get into that says, come here for porn. We don't have adults only sections in our public libraries. We don't even have the funding to be able to create those.

And yet you are threatening us, your legislation with up to one year in prison if a kid walks into our library and checks out a book that you conservatives think is inappropriate for this kid. So they're challenging her law alleging that it violates the First Amendment and of course the 14th Amendment. And I gotta tell you, they have a very good chance of being successful with this lawsuit. Similar by the way, to the lawsuits filed by book publishers down here in Florida against Ron DeSantis for his book bands. And here's the reason that this lawsuit and the Florida one have a good chance of being successful. No one has yet been able to give a firm definition of what objectionable material is. And I know there is First Amendment, you know, case history. If you've ever taken any kind of First Amendment legal course, uh, you understand that, you know, you've got the whole period, uh, perent interest in sex and all that, that applies to certain texts.

And if it does or if it doesn't. But because of that, we actually have very explicit guidelines from the Supreme Court about what could be considered quote unquote, uh, quote unquote obscene. So we have that and these things that are being banned in Arkansas, these books in Florida, these books all over the south that are being banned do not meet those standards set by the United States Supreme Court in multiple different cases. So I do not see how these lawsuits could not be successful until, of course, you remember the makeup of the current United States Supreme Court, you know, six three majority, couple of corrupt bastards sitting over there on the right hand side of the court. So yeah, they could actually be, be ruled constitutional in an ordinary world. They wouldn't be hell

In an an ordinary world. We wouldn't be having book bans right now in the year 2023 in the United States of America. But I hope these lawsuits are successful. I think they've got very sound legal arguments, or they've got Supreme Court precedent on their side. Although with this court, clearly precedent doesn't matter. But I will say this to the book banners out there, whether you're in Florida or Arkansas or Texas or wherever, just remember this one thing. Throughout the course of human history, there isn't a single era upon which we look back on and say, you know what? Those book banners, they were right. Think about that. Folks, throughout human existence, the people banning books have never been on the right side of history.