(LifeSiteNews) — Public schools do not have to allow inappropriate books in school libraries, a federal judge ruled in a Florida case concerning a pro-LGBT book about penguins.
The New York Times reported that the case concerns the Escambia County School Board’s decision to ban “And Tango Makes Three,” a pro-homosexual children’s book about two male penguins. The decision aligned with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act, which bars the promotion of gender ideology to children in third grade and younger, among other provisions.
The book’s authors, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, along with an anonymous elementary-school student filed a lawsuit against the ban, arguing it constituted impermissible viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment.
Judge Allen Winsor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida disagreed, siding with the school board on the grounds that school libraries are not public forums, and not hosting a book does not prevent individuals from accessing it elsewhere. “The First Amendment offers Plaintiffs no protection” in this matter, he wrote.
It is an article of progressive faith that gender is no more than a matter of self-perception that individuals are free to change at will. But according to modern biology, sex is not a subjective sense of self but an objective scientific reality, established by an individual’s chromosomes from their earliest moments of existence and reflected by hundreds of genetically based characteristics.
Yet for years LGBT activists have worked to promote “gender fluidity,” the idea that sexual identity is separate from biology and discernible only by personal perception, across public education, libraries, health care, and cultural traditions such as beauty contests, school homecomings, and athletic competitions.
The American Library Association recognizes no meaningful parental or community control over exposing children to such material. Its Library Bill of Rights says books and other materials in libraries “should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation” or “because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval” and that a “person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views” without any means of restricting access to certain material on the basis of “chronological age.”