Virginia Republicans Won't Get To Ban Dirty Sexporn Books From Barnes & Noble After All

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.wonkette.com/virginia-republicans-won-t-get-to-ban-dirty-sexporn-books-from-barnes-noble-after-all

A Virginia judge on Tuesday pinched another rightwing censorship attempt in the bud, dismissing a lawsuit brought by two Republicans who tried to use an obscure commonwealth law to make sale of two books illegal to minors without written parental consent, and to bar them from public schools as well, the Washington Post reports (free gift linky here). That's good news for Barnes & Noble, the bookstore chain targeted in the suit. We should also note that the attempt to get a ruling against the Virginia Beach school system was ultimately moot, since the school district had already pulled all copies of both books from its libraries.

The suit was filed earlier this year by two Republicans, Del. Tim Anderson and Tommy Altman, who's running for Congress but might settle for Witchfinder General. The two sought to ban sales of two books, the inevitable Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe, a graphic memoir about the author's experiences with being nonbinary and asexual, andA Court of Mist and Fury, by Sarah J. Maas, which is about fairy folk who fuck and do dark political intrigues, we guess.

The lawsuit attempted to use an old Virginia law that, as the Post explains,

says that any Virginia citizen can file in court to have a book ruled obscene and, if a judge acquiesces, that anyone who thereafter distributes the book “is presumed to have knowledge that the book is obscene” and could be found criminally liable. The code is decades old.

Circuit Judge Pamela Baskervill found that the law just flat out violated the First Amendment by imposing government censorship, and by treating anyone distributing a supposedly obscene book as having conscious intent to break the law, even if a particular bookseller or librarian knew nothing about the book. Baskervill also found the law violated due process rights, to boot.

*snip*

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. This was a stupid move

[elleng]

2. Knowing It When You See It

'In his concurring opinion in the 1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio case, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart delivered what has become the most well-known line related to the detection of “hard-core” pornography: the infamous “I know it when I see it" statement.

“I have reached the conclusion . . . that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”'

http://cbldf.org/about-us/case-files/obscenity-case-files/obscenity-case-files-jacobellis-v-ohio-i-know-it-when-i-see-it/

[Hermit-The-Prog]

5. Thank you for that link to lots of info!

[littlemissmartypants]

3. Wonkette is always a fun read. Thanks, Nevilledog.❤️

[underpants]

4. 👀 Yes it is

Reading later.

[underpants]

6. Funny

Perhaps they all knew the plaintiffs, or maybe some had previously had babies stolen and replaced with Changelings by randy political-infighting fairy folk, which would definitely make one biased.