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In Major Win, Appeals Court Upholds Block on Texas Book Rating Law
For those who think those of us harping against censorship are “terminally online” because it’s not relevant to real life, this is a description of the law that was just overturned:
Under the law, books rated “sexually explicit”—books with material deemed “patently offensive” by unspecified community standards—are banned entirely from Texas public schools. Books rated “sexually relevant”—books with any representation of sexual conduct—would require written parental permission for students to access them. Furthermore, the law gives the state the unchecked power to change the vendor rating on any book, and to bar vendors that do not accept the state’s ratings from selling to Texas schools.
In other words, it gave the state free range to ban any books they decided had “sexually explicit” material (which ofc is up to their discretion).
THIS is why we care about people trying to censor sexual material in fiction online, bc it’s happening offline all around us…!
This is a big victory, but many other states have book bans in place.
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