Job lost his animals, servants, and 10 children in a single afternoon. And then came the boils. Oh, the boils. He had done nothing to deserve it. That is what makes his lamentations worth recording.

In contrast, Nate Coulter, executive director of the Central Arkansas Library System, filed a lawsuit regarding Act 372 of 2023, the common-sense library law, in Fayetteville before liberal Judge Timothy Brooks. CALS unsurprisingly won with Brooks deciding. But the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed. And last Sunday, in these pages, Coulter lamented losing his unfettered discretion on where to shelve books.

Coulter opens with the claim that "Arkansas will become the only state in America where it will be a crime to 'make available' books that are 'harmful to minors' in public libraries and stores." Hogwash. Half the country has such laws.

He then writes that the Eighth Circuit held that Act 372 "will force librarians and bookstores to 'choose [among] removing books from their shelves, taking compliance measures they attest would be costly, or risking criminal prosecution.'" Uh, no it didn't.

The Eighth Circuit simply repeated CALS' claims to establish that it has standing (as the quotes within quotes demonstrate). Moreover, CALS' middle clause does all of the work: "compliance measures [librarians] attest would be costly," i.e., the objecting party says compliance will be expensive. Of course they do. Boo hoo. What should we pay to protect children? The appellate court went on to say that the trial court's analysis was "patently deficient," because judges "cannot conjure up their own hypotheticals en route to striking down laws as overbroad."

Later, Coulter admits: "Public libraries . . . have books in our collection that are too sexually explicit for young children . . . shelved in adult sections." Wait, what? The library already accounts for inappropriate materials for children? So why all the hysteria?

He goes on to claim that "fear of going to jail is real among librarians. The first option laid out for us by the courts--removing books that contain sexually explicit content--would mean getting rid of thousands of........

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