A Georgia school district will be paying the $100,000 in legal fees of Mother Bears, a local parent’s group, after it banned one of its members from attending board meetings, The Blaze reports.
The group took legal action against the Forsyth County School District when Alison Hair was banned after reading sexually explicit excerpts from a book entitled, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” during a February 2022 board meeting.
Mother Bears was attempting to sound the alarm about the type of materials available in public school libraries.
During Hair’s first attempt to read from the book available at her son’s middle school, she was interrupted by a board member and stopped from reading the pornographic passage. After Hair attempted to read from it again at a second meeting, the school board sent a letter banning her from attending further school board meetings.
This resulted in Mother Bears launching a lawsuit against the school board in July 2022.
The Blaze provides more details of the successful lawsuit:
“People cannot fairly pass judgment on books that they haven’t read,” the mothers’ suit stated. “And when a school’s judgment as to which books young children should read is the subject of political debate, the First Amendment protects parents’ right to read aloud from these books, as well as the public’s right to hear the language at issue. But the Forsyth County School Board, embarrassed by debate about its choices, has gone so far as to silence and banish from its meetings any parent who simply reads aloud from its schools’ library books.”
In November, a federal judge determined that the FCS school board’s public participation policy was unconstitutional, according to the Institute for Free Speech, which represented the mothers in the case. The judge also forced the board to allow Hair to attend school board meetings.
The Mama Bears won the legal battle, and the school district agreed to pay the mothers’ attorney’s fees for censoring the women.
OpentheWord.org 