A school district in Georgia was forced to pay $100,000 in legal fees to a group of mothers who were barred from conducting out loud readings at school board meetings of the porn-infested books the board had approved for kids to see on school library shelves.
A federal court ordered the Forsyth, Georgia, County School District to pay the legal fees of the group calling themselves the Mama Bears, who sued the district when officials barred them from reading from the disgusting books during board meetings, according to Atlanta NBC affiliate WXIA.
The group claimed that the school board violated their First Amendment rights in order to hide the disgusting, inappropriate content of the books from the public. And a federal judge agreed, ruling that the board’s efforts to shut the mom’s group down was unconstitutional.
The lawsuit against the district was brought by parents Alison Hair and Cindy Martin who attempted to read aloud at a board meeting passages of board-approved books that she feels are pornographic in nature. Hair and other members of Mama Bears group were barred from reading the passages, a policy the women claimed is illegal.
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The women’s group sued the school district in a federal lawsuit and won. Fox News added that the district was ordered to pay the Mama Bears nominal damages of $17.91 and their attorneys fees of $107,500.
The court also told the district they were prohibited from barring the plaintiffs or any “current or future FCS speakers entitled to speak at an FCS school board meeting, from reading or quoting verbatim from the text of any book or written works available in an FCS library or classroom, while addressing the school board during the public-comment period at school board meetings.”
Martin noted that the $17.91 damages fee was symbolic as 1791 is the year that the First Amendment was ratified, Fox News added in another report.
“I got my check last week, and I also through Amazon, ordered a copy of the Bill of Rights. So I’m getting a frame, and I’m going to be framing the Bill of Rights next to my check for $17.91,” Martin proudly told Fox.
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Martin added that her victory is also for people who disagree with her goal of having the inappropriate books removed from school libraries.
“We have incurred a lot of backlash from people who don’t agree with us,” she said. “But guess what? We won for them as well. This was for everyone to have the freedom to speak whatever they want to their government officials. So whether they like it or not, this was a win for them as well. And I’m proud of that. I’m happy to represent all people to be able to speak freely before their government officials.”
The moms group and their pro bono counsel, the D.C.-based nonprofit Institute for Free Speech, also said that their lawsuit was launched to highlight the issues for parents everywhere, ProPublica reported.
“The hope is that other elected officials, people who are on school boards and thinking about running for school board, or school officials that interact with them like superintendents, see this result and are more careful when they are tempted to censor other parents in the future,” said Del Kolde, a senior attorney with the Institute for Free Speech.
That hope is especially poignant considering the evidence the Mamma Bears presented in internal emails that show how the Forsyth school district worked behind the scenes to craft rules that quashed the ability of parents to criticize the board during their meetings.
Rules were added to outlaw boisterous commenting, barred parents from addressing individual board members by name, and increased reasons for the local police to swoop in and yank people out of board meetings and to bar them from coming back. The board says it is now considering ways to step back from these more restrictive rules, ProPublica added.
Of course, this district in Georgia, like those in Virginia that have been at the center of controversy, have become autocratic, haughty, and arrogant, in their disregard for the wishes of the parents they are supposed to be representing by hewing to the radical, left-wing, LGBT agenda.
So, not only is this a perfect outcome for free speech, it is also a perfect outcome to take the fight to these left-wing school boards that insist on exposing little kids to sexually inappropriate and dangerous books.
These kinds of books do not belong in classrooms and highlighting their content so the public knows just what is in them can lead to their being removed from our schools, as they should be.
