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| A federal appeals court blocked a drag show ban at West Texas A&M University on Monday. A few days before, a federal judge in Florida struck down major parts of Florida's book ban law. |
As we deal with the second term of the jackass better known as Donald Trump, vestiges of old culture wars are disintegrating under our noses.
From The Texas Tribune:
A federal appeals court Monday blocked West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler from enforcing a campus drag show ban, ruling that the performances are likely protected under the First Amendment.
The 2-1 ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a lower court’s decision upholding Wendler’s 2023 cancellation of a drag show, which he argued was demeaning to women and compared to blackface. The decision means Spectrum WT, the student group that brought the lawsuit, can produce drag shows on campus while its lawsuit continues in a lower court.
Judge Leslie H. Southwick, who wrote for the majority, said the context of the students’ event made its message of supporting the queer community clear.
“The viewers of the drag show would have been ticketed audience members attending a performance sponsored by LGBT+ student organizations and designed to raise funds for LGBT+ suicide-prevention charity, “ wrote Southwick, who was appointed by George W. Bush. “Against this backdrop, the message sent by parading on a theater stage in attire of the opposite sex would have been unmistakable.”
The court concluded that Legacy Hall, where the drag show was scheduled to take place, was a designated public forum open to a variety of groups, including churches and political candidates. That meant banning drag shows targeted the content of the event, something the Constitution allows only in the rarest cases.
Finally, the court found that students faced ongoing irreparable harm to their speech rights, noting Wendler had canceled another drag show planned for 2024 and declared that no drag shows would ever be allowed on campus.
And a few days earlier in Florida, according to LGBTQNation:
A federal judge in Florida has struck down major parts of the state’s book ban law, ruling that it violates the First Amendment by sweeping protected literature off school library shelves.
In 2023, Florida enacted H.B. 1069, expanding the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law to prohibit classroom discussions of LGBTQ+ identities through the end of high school. The measure also required schools to remove books flagged for “sexual content,” a vague standard most often applied to works addressing race, gender, and sexuality.
Six major book publishers, the Authors Guild, and parents from Escambia County sued after dozens of books were removed. They argued that H.B. 1069 gave parents and residents unchecked power to demand removals of any book considered “pornographic” or “describes sexual conduct,” without clear legal definitions. Under this sweeping standard, students lost access to award-winning books including The Color Purple, Cloud Atlas, The Freedom Writers Diary, Looking for Alaska, Slaughterhouse-Five, Shout, The Handmaid’s Tale, Beloved, and The Bluest Eye.
In a broad order, federal Judge Carlos Mendoza of the U.S. Middle District Court of Florida found the state’s book ban unconstitutionally overbroad, calling it an “I know it when I see it” test that chilled free speech. “None of these books are obscene,” Mendoza wrote in his order. “The restrictions placed on these books are thus unreasonable.”
. . .Rejecting the state’s claim that removals were simply government “curation,” Judge Mendoza held that delegating an unchecked “license to object to materials under an ‘I know it when I see it’ approach” to parents, “regardless of the holistic value of the book individually or as part of a larger collection,” amounted to outright censorship.
We probably won't hear the opposition make noise about these decisions because they've moved on to new rage-baits campaigns involving male cheerleaders and Sydney Sweeney (and I don't even KNOW who that little white girl is.)
