Mark Herron isn’t exactly a media lawyer. His specialty is discrimination and employment rights, and most of his cases involve mistreatment in the workplace stemming from gender, race, or disability status.
That’s what made the case of Karen Cahall v. New Richmond Exempted Village School District so interesting to him. Cahall has been a third grade teacher in public schools south of Cincinnati for 30 years. In November 2024, she was suspended without pay for three days after a parent complained there were four books featuring LBGTQ+ characters in her classroom library: Ana On the Edge by A.J. Sass, The Fabulous Zed Watson by Basil Sylvester, Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea by Ashley Herring Blake, and Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukoff. The books were stored not on shelves but in bins, through which students had to sift in order to choose what to read. The titles were neither prominently displayed nor discussed in class. They were simply there—but that was enough.
Herron says the lawsuit over his client’s suspension centers on two issues. First, the county is very conservative, and there are several pastors on the local school board. The pressure to remove those books while other workers within the school wear religious insignia, Herron argues, infringes on Cahall’s own religious belief that LGBTQ+ communities should be accepted, respected, and loved.
The second factor is a policy in the school that forbids teachers from teaching about “contentious” matters. But no one can really say what that means.
“What’s controversial and what’s not?” Herron asks. “To an extent, that’s something two people can disagree on. Reasonable people can disagree on anything, so you can’t say don’t teach something controversial without more guidance.”
Assessing which materials are controversial in public libraries and schools is a costly endeavor, both in money and in time, and the organized push to ban books from public and school library shelves has increased dramatically over the past few years. In 2024, 5,813 books were challenged throughout the country, nearly 25 times more than in 2015.
In 2023, USA Today found that taxpayers across four school districts in Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Utah paid at least $270,000 to review challenged books and assess whether they included “controversial” content. That’s about $67,000 spent per institution, meaning it costs nearly the average salary of a full-time employee to ban books in a given district.
“The playbook has shifted”
This mass push to censor reading materials requires legal intervention in order to keep control of materials in the hands of librarians and teachers rather than giving it to outside actors. In late 2022, attorney Ric Jacobs says, a patron visited the Dayton Memorial Library, the only public library in rural Columbia County, Wash., and moved a copy of Juno Dawson’s What’s the T? The Guide to All Things Trans and/or Nonbinary from one side of the children’s section to another. The book, originally shelved with college materials meant for teenagers, was moved to an area with cartoonish furniture and picture books, where the patron snapped a photo of it and shared it on Facebook.
“That misleading social media post and the fervor from it started things off,” Jacobs recalls. Soon the library director faced demands to remove that book and others. When those demands were refused, Facebook users started a smear campaign, Jacobs says, in which they accused the director of being a pedophile. The director resigned in July 2023, but before long, the fervor moved to the ballot: organizers managed to acquire enough signatures to launch a local referendum to close the public library and return its books and resources to the state of Washington.
The measure ultimately failed. Jacobs filed an injunction on behalf of a local political action committee, called Neighbors United for Progress, to remove the referendum from the November 2023 ballot, and the county court ruled that the majority of signatures acquired were fraudulent. The affidavits, Jacobs says, were filed by signatories stating that they were asked if they wanted to protect local children and to sign if they did—with no knowledge that the library would close as a result. Shortly after, the state increased the number of signatures required to close a library from 10% of voters to 25%.
“My hope is that even the people who signed the petition realize that they narrowly avoided disaster,” Jacobs says. “This is about the consequences of censorship and reveals that the playbook has shifted for people with really extreme views on censoring speech and access to information.”
“The conversation is going to continue”
Cahall’s case is ongoing, and in the meantime she’s still working. The Columbia County matter has also been put to bed for now. But other municipalities have not been so lucky.
In summer 2021, officials in Llano County, Tex., about an hour and a half northeast of Austin, ordered that the county’s library system remove 17 books from its shelves. The effort was led by four individuals who soon became members of the library board. The banned books ranged in content, from titles covering the history of the Ku Klux Klan as a terrorist group to children’s books about using the bathroom.
The titles were deemed pornographic, and most of them were removed from the library catalog. Even so, in December 2021, the library was closed for three days so public commissioners could review the catalog. Concurrently, the existing library board was dissolved and replaced.
In 2022, seven residents of the county sued the local government over restricting access to books. Almost a year later, in March 2023, a U.S. district judge ordered that the banned books be replaced. That decision was appealed and the action put on hold. A federal appeals panel determined that eight of the 17 books could be reshelved. Then this past May, another federal appeals court reversed the lower court’s decision, ruling in a 10–7 decision that it was constitutional to remove all 17 books.
Ryan Goellner represented the American Library Association, Freedom to Read Foundation, and Texas Library Association, which filed amicus briefs in support of the Llano County residents advocating for the reshelving of books during the en banc stage to affirm the injunction on behalf of Llano plaintiffs. But as it stands today, the case permits a degree of censorship.
“I can’t speak to the exact status of the books,” Goellner says. “But what the Fifth Circuit as an entire court said is that the district court was incorrect to issue an injunction for removing books.”
What Goellner learned in the Llano County case is that freedom of expression isn’t always as clear-cut as the public thinks it is. There are reams of case law behind the First Amendment that are constantly being interpreted, and reinterpreted, by courts with varying ideological slants.
Libraries, and public libraries in particular, are often in financial crunches and depend on tax dollars to keep the lights on. They rarely have the resources to defend against lawsuits on their own. Sometimes choosing the route of least resistance and simply removing titles from library shelves—especially in rural, low-income communities—is the only surefire way for librarians to keep their jobs. The alternative: fight the fight, and risk having to move to new locales in hopes of finding comparable positions.
“A lot of us assume what the First Amendment means, but I encourage people to actually read about it,” Goellner says. “For better or worse, the conversation is going to continue.”
Correction: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly described Goellner as the attorney for Llano County residents in Little v. Llano County.
