I am going to put a song link below. I remember the night as a little boy me and one of my hellspawn siblings hunched close to the TV to watch the movie. The adoptive father had forbiden us to watch it as he worked nights and was trying to sleep. But she convinced me it would be OK if we sat really close to the TV and kept the sound down. By this time in my life, I was used to doing what I was told to do. Now looking back I realize she wanted me there for coverage knowing I would pay for the indiscresion and she wouldn’t.
So we sat there next to the TV and I heard this song. It was such a song of hope and I wanted so much for it to be true. However as was so often in my life as a child someone had to pay the price, and that someone was me. When the show was over and as the credits came on the screen he came out. He said I hope it was worth it. He ordered his daughter to her room and grabbed my arm dragging me back to his bedroom. I paid the price for her and for hearing the song. I don’t think I need to go into the details, it was the same thing that happened almost daily in my life at that point. One pain or another always equaling someone else taking their enjoyment or anger out on my small body. But the song stuck with me and in many ways became my anthem for hope of a better life. Sad a 7-year-old needed that. And even sadder are the memories of what he did to me that night in either his anger or need. Below is the song. Hugs
If you read the law it lets anyone claim to be offended by any media and that it doesn’t need to be declared obscene to be labeled obscene. Why is that? Because to a small group of very vocal haters just the existence of LGBTQ+ people is obscene. It offends their god so it offends them. But don’t try to claim the Bible is obscene or pushes offensive stuff it has special carve outs that make all the icky bad parts OK. I hope this will be appealed to the full appeals court as this attempt to errase an entire population of people based on bigotry must not be allowed to stand. I also just read where the education department under the hypermaga education secretary will not be enforcing or even recording the bullying and abuse of the LGBTQ+ kids at school. Her view is let the little fagots fend for themselves it seems. Remember she and her husband turned a blind eye to the many young boys being sexually assaulted by the wrestlers in their group.
Also the majority of the three judges panel said that the three patrons did not have standing to object because no books had been banned yet. They seem to have a wait and see if the victim is stabbed before taking the knife from the threatening person. That is stupid. Everyone knows what the law is intended to do and the writers of the law admit that openly. It seems the tRump appointed judges want to let attacks on the librarians and on the books that mention gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, and questioning kids / people be removed as soon as possible knowing it is harder to put them back than to ban them in the first place. Hugs.
The “social section” in Crawford County Library’s Van Buren branch (Screenshot from court documents)
A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that Arkansas’ 2023 law restricting access to library materials can go into effect, three years after a judge blocked two sections of the law on First Amendment grounds.
The three-judge panel from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis ruled that the 18 plaintiffs had no standing to challenge one section of Act 372 and failed to prove that the other section was unconstitutionally vague.
The two sections create criminal liability for librarians who distribute content that some consider “obscene” or “harmful to minors,” and give city and county governing bodies the final say over library content.
Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin praised the ruling, saying it “allows Arkansas to move forward in enforcing a law that protects children from obscene materials while increasing accountability for public-library curation decisions.”
The plaintiffs challenging the law include libraries, bookstores, advocacy groups and individual library patrons. Their lead attorney, John Adams, said in a statement that the legal team is “evaluating all available legal options, including further review by the courts,” after Thursday’s ruling.
“Libraries and bookstores should be places where people can freely explore ideas — not where booksellers and librarians face criminal liability for selling, checking out, or even just shelving constitutionally protected books,” Adams said. “The freedom to read is fundamental to a free society and has always been protected by the First Amendment.”
Griffin said Act 372 was meant to “to address legitimate concerns about minors’ access to obscene materials and to establish a process for reviewing challenged content.”
School and public libraries already had content challenge policies before Act 372. The law stalled in the Legislature in 2023 before it was amended to say library materials would be relocated to an area inaccessible to minors, not removed from the premises, if elected officials find them to be “obscene.”
Section 5 of Act 372 allows city and county governing bodies to relocate challenged material if a challenger disagrees with a library panel’s decision to keep it in its original section.
Another section of the law that gave school boards the same authority over school library materials had not been challenged.
Adams told the appeals court in June that Crawford County, a defendant in the case, showed what the law’s restrictions would look like in practice. The county’s five library branches separated LGBTQ+ children’s books from the rest of the collection after public outcry, and county officials cited Act 372 as a reason to maintain these “social sections,” even before the legislation became law.
Crawford County lost a separate federal lawsuit in 2024 after three parents alleged that the “social sections” violated the First Amendment.
The three library patrons who sued over the state law do not have standing because Section 5’s book challenge and relocation policies do not harm the plaintiffs, the appeals court panel said Thursday.
“Plaintiffs are speculating libraries might decide to segregate certain books as part of their curation policies, which they have not yet adopted, or in response to challenges, which have not yet been filed,” the panel wrote.
The librarian and bookstore plaintiffs have standing to challenge the other section of the law because they would be at risk of prosecution for noncompliance, according to the ruling, but the three judges disagreed with Adams’ claim that Section 1 of Act 372 was too vague.
This section makes “furnishing a harmful item to a minor” a Class A misdemeanor. Conviction would lead to a maximum prison sentence of one year.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks wrote that the law’s lack of a definition for terms like “furnishing” and “harmful” could lead to violations of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
An unchallenged provision of Act 372 removes schools and public libraries from the part of Arkansas state code that previously exempted them from prosecution for disseminating obscene content. Another unchallenged provision made school and public library employees liable for a Class D felony if they “knowingly” distribute obscene material or inform others of how to obtain it. A Class D felony conviction carries a maximum prison sentence of six years.
However, the language of Section 1 “limit[s] its application to situations when a person knowingly furnishes an item to a minor knowing of the item’s harmful character” and therefore is not too vague, the appeals court ruled.
Chief Judge Steven Colloton wrote in a concurring opinion Thursday that he understood the plaintiffs’ vagueness claim but disagreed with it “because third-party library patrons have no constitutional right to receive unfettered access to books of their choice at taxpayer expense.”
Colloton was appointed to the court in 2003 by then-President George W. Bush and has been chief judge since 2024. President Donald Trump appointed the panel’s other two judges, Ralph Erickson and L. Steven Grasz, in 2017.
Erickson was on the three-judge panel in April that allowed a 2023 Iowa law to go into effect, requiring the removal of books containing “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” from Iowa public school libraries.
The removal of the injunction on Act 372 comes as the Arkansas Department of Education has been considering requiring public libraries to restrict children’s access to “sexually explicit materials” in order to receive state funding.
Dozens of Arkansans told the education department in June that they oppose requiring libraries to ensure patrons age 16 or younger cannot check out materials that depict or describe sexual contact and behavior.
The Arkansas State Library Board will meet Aug. 14 to consider sending the rules to a legislative panel for further approval. Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appointed all six board members.
Author Info
Tess Vrbin
Tess Vrbin came to the Advocate from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, where she reported on low-income housing and tenants’ rights, and won awards for her coverage of 2021 flooding and tornado damage in rural Arkansas. She previously covered local government for The Commercial Dispatch in Mississippi and state government for the Columbia Daily Tribune in Missouri.
Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
For those who think it is just the government of Israel that is pro-genocide of the Palestinians. In fact due to media and training in jewish schools the drum has long been pushing that Palestinians are evil sub humans. Sound familiar? It is what happened to the very people now doing it to others. Seems they learned the wrong lessons from Germany in the 1930s to 1945. The public is mostly fully OK with what the government is doing and the media has pushed it hard like our own billionaire bought media is trying to do. The media is hiding the truth and wants to push a narrative that supports / makes Israel the poor agreevied party when they are in fact the ones pushing the hostility and threats onto others. Israel retuniely killed journalists and banned all others from entering Gaza and the West Bank trying to keep video of the crimes being committed by the Jewish public and Israeli government from being seen by the world. They know what they are doing is wrong and if people knew the truth they would force their government to stop Israel.
Israel doesn’t want coexistence with others; it wants to rule over them. They want to take land they claim a 2,500 year old document gives to them that the rest of the world doesn’t recognize as the borderlines. Here is the public supported by the majority of the government, saying no Arabs in Gaza anymore. While the IDF destroyed water for the Gazans, they passed it out to the illegal settlers. If Palitisinans were doing this on their side of the fence the IDF would shoot them no questions asked. The MR crew is doing an impressive job laying out the difference in rules and privileges for the Palestinians and the settlers. As Matt says, Israel is now South Africa apartheid on steroids. Hugs
OK this won’t be a full post on my abuse because Ron is terrified of my being emotionally upset before my surgery tomorrow. This female sibling was pregnant at 13 and married at 14. But while she was in the house she was the defacto caregiver to me. She was the one who tied me to a stair banister and let her boyfriends and other boys rape me. Her soon to be husband wanted more so she arranged for him to force me to give him blow jobs and rape me in other places / context. He had a fascination with buttholes so you can guess what that meant for the 3, and 4 and 5 and 6 year old me.
She was the one who farmed me out to the guy across the street at age 3 who was a real little boy lover so while he used my body he never made me hurt like I was being hurt at home. He often got upset at my bruised body. He often gave me the only real affection I felt at that time. I just had to let him use my body to gain it.
She tried to get me removed from the will due to the fact I was adopted. In her own writings she said I was never a part of the family so shouldn’t have a share of the inheritance. She failed to mention how badly I was treated by the family for some reason. The courts disagreed with her. Her husband was the executor of the estate and he was informed and needed to be ordered by the court to change the legal paperwork to reflect my new legal name, but in her obituary she used the family name of my abusers. She knew better at this point, as did her husband who once was said to be a corrupt cop.
I am going to try to keep my mind from it. But what Ron doesn’t know is my mind went there last night. Just not bad enough for me to yell / scream out. I will have to deal with it soon. But not hopefully tonight the night before my spine surgery. Hugs
I watched this the day it aired on the show. My gods how horrific and horrifying. The out of control settlers try to kill these people because they are recording the stealing of Palestinian lands and murdering Palestinians. If the driver had been any slower these people in the cars would have been killed. And the IDF supported the attacks on helpless people. US citizens. The Israeli government takes our taxpayer money and supports the killing of US citizens and reporters. If there is anything that says the Israelis know they are committing war crimes it is the killing of the reporters for showing their crimes. The place these attacks took place is in a zone that no Israeli is supposed to be even allowed in. Israeli is out of control and they use our taxpayer money to do it. The reason the reporter wanted to go to that spot was because a palestinian man’s son was killed and those with him hunted for 2 hours by settlers. The settlers live in the homes that the Palestinians built for themselves. Israeli settlers are nothing more than thieving thugs, and the population of Israel supports them which makes all those in Israel supporting this nothing more than thieving thugs. The people in these cars were terrified. You can hear it in the cries of the people in the car. The US ambassador supports Israel in this killing of US people. Please watch and do what you can to stop these lawless attacks against innocent people by Israeli settlers. Hugs
Ro Khanna details the abuses the Israelis commit against the palestinians and how the authorities do nothing to stop these abuses. Khanna gives numerous details and says that the israeli governments want to make it clear that no one should go to see the attractions and abuse done to the Palestinians but should only visit the Jewish parts of Israel. This is the best reporting of what happened to the congressman and the other US citizens. Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 