First Amendment

Posted by Valerie on February 22, 2009

Well, here’s what I think.

Children have a responsibility to govern themselves, first of all, but they often don’t. Against the disturbing United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, children are given into the direct care of their parents by God, to grow up in their own family cultures requiring the unmediated attention of neither the church nor the state except in rare cases.

Even as children are under the direct authority of their parents, they enjoy the same Bill of Rights as any other citizens. A father or a mother may restrict a child’s access to reading content, but the state does not share this authority and cannot infringe upon a child’s First Amendment right to obtain information. (Free access to information is the logical corollary of the freedom of speech.)

We don’t know what lead testing will show yet, but in the case of thousands of particular children’s titles, there are no copies but pre-1985 copies. If these copies are removed from community libraries, church libraries and school libraries as well as suppressed in the marketplace, by Congressional fiat, then the First Amendment rights of children will certainly be infringed in the process. If our nation permits this aggression against our children’s rights, we should not feel confident there will never be an attempt to regulate the use of “banned hazardous material” within our homes.

In the past, against constitutional local autonomy, by the way, some courts have found that children’s First Amendment rights are infringed when even a handful of particular titles have been removed from a single library. It is hard for me to imagine a court ruling, then, that children’s First Amendment rights would not be infringed if every copy of a very long list of titles is suppressed by the State with no credible evidence of compelling interest.

One library in northern Illinois has the most exceptional children’s non-fiction collection within at least 150 miles. Removal of the pre-1985 titles would decimate that collection. The lost content would be missed by children and could not be equally supplied by in-print books. Students would lose access to particular ideas, authors, and subjects.

In my experience as a homeschooling parent and a bookseller, children as young as eight or ten will sometimes develop admiration for particular authors or particular series. Those students, even at surprisingly early ages, will create reading lists, seeking every title, often using inter-library loan programs for this purpose. I hope that it doesn’t happen, but if the day comes when a student walks into a library and fills out an inter-library loan request and is told that his request cannot possibly be filled because 1) he is only ten years old and 2) that children’s book was last printed in 1975, I would say that the State has clearly infringed his First Amendment right.

Children consult with booksellers as well, and I believe that under this disrespected Constitution a child can legally come into my store, request advice on a book, get honest advice not censored to exclude harmless lead content, and then buy whatever title he pleases, even if his choice was printed in 1910. The only governor with legitimate authority to interfere would be the child’s parent.

A Second Thought

You can read more on this issue in the comments at Overlawyered.com: Is Litigation the Answer to the CPSIA Problem?

There’s a good warning there in the main post, so you’ll want to read it too.