A school district in northeast Florida must put back in libraries three dozen books as part of a settlement reached Thursday with students and parents who sued over what they said was an unlawful decision to limit access to dozens of titles containing LGBTQ+ content.
Under the agreement the School Board of Nassau County must restore access to three dozen titles including “And Tango Makes Three,” a children’s picture book based on a true story about two male penguins that raised a chick together at New York’s Central Park Zoo. Authors Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson were plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the district, which is about 35 miles (about 60 kilometers) northeast of Jacksonville along the Georgia border.
The suit was one of several challenges to book bans since state lawmakers last year passed, and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law, legislation making it easier to challenge educational materials that opponents consider pornographic and obscene. Last month six major publishers and several well-known authors filed a federal lawsuit in Orlando arguing that some provisions of the law violate the First Amendment rights of publishers, authors and students.
Even then, a state constitution can’t override the federal constitution. You would need an amendment at the federal level for every statute that violates it. There’s still laws on the books that were perfectly legal at the time they were passed, but never got repealed. Although I do think that it should be required to repeal laws that are completely unconstitutional such as sundown laws. Some states will pass preemptive laws that are conditional on a change in opinion from the supreme Court.