Appeals Court: Miami-Dade Book Ban Isn’t Censorship
Plaintiffs are examining their legal options after a federal appeals court rejected February 5 their challenge of a 2006 order from the board of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools to remove a children’s book about contemporary life in Cuba. The three-judge panel instructed a district court to lift its preliminary injunction on the districtwide removal of Vamos a Cuba and its English-language translation A Visit to Cuba.
Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, stated February 5 that the civil-liberties group would “move forward to protect free speech in America’s public schools through one of the multiple legal options that are available.”
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told American Libraries, “Naturally we are disappointed with this decision. The book ban is unconstitutional, and we will continue to support the ACLU’s efforts to return the books to the shelves of the Miami-Dade school libraries.” ALA’s Freedom to Read Foundation had filed an amicus curiae brief (PDF file) for the plaintiffs in ACLU of Florida v. Miami-Dade School Board, along with Reforma and other groups.
In a 2–1 vote, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the school board’s action did not violate the First Amendment. However, the lone dissenting judge, Charles R. Wilson, characterized the school board’s ban of Vamos, along with the other 23 unchallenged books in the “A Visit to . . .” series, as “an offense” to the First Amendment.
Writing the majority opinion (PDF file), Judge Ed Carnes stated that the school board “did not ban any book [but] removed from its own school libraries a book that the board had purchased for those libraries with board funds. It did not prohibit anyone else form owning, possessing, or reading the book” and that “there is a difference between not including graphic detail about adult subjects on the one hand and falsely representing that everything is hunky dory on the other.” The cover of Vamos depicts laughing Cuban children dressed in the uniform of the nation’s Communist Party.
Judge Carnes also wrote that board members acted not out of dislike for the book, but because “everyone, including both sides’ experts, agreed that the book contained factual inaccuracies.” The defense had pointed to several passages it deemed misleading, including an assertion that paintings on rocks in a Cuban valley were “made by people who lived in Cuba about 1,000 years ago”; the board had countered that the paintings were made in the 1960s. Despite apparent inaccuracies within the series, however, both sides had agreed that the series was “educationally significant and developmentally appropriate” for its intended audience of 4–6-year-olds, according to FTRF General Counsel Theresa Chmara.
Simon characterized the latest Vamos ruling as having “twisted the law into a pretzel.” The decision differs considerably from the precedent-setting 1982 Supreme Court decision in Island Trees v. Pico, which established that “local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.” Simon asserted that the ACLU would strive “to prevent the shelves of the Miami-Dade school library from being scrubbed clean of viewpoints some people in the school find objectionable.”
Posted on February 11, 2009. Discuss.