“The library didn’t put this table out there for publications like The Gay Guardian to distribute themselves,” argued library attorney Cathy Harris Helms before the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, contending that the library halted distribution of any nongovernment publication from the literature table to maintain control of the facility. Marcus has testified that library Director Dusty Gres told him the paper’s removal was “a religious issue, gays vs. straights,” which Gres denies saying, according to the August 9 Augusta Chronicle.
The appeal seeks to reverse the opinion of U.S. District Judge B. Avant Edenfield, who ruled that libraries offer opportunities for free speech as an act of “largesse, not regulations,” asking rhetorically, “What right does an ’unwanted-speech’ speaker have to tell a librarian what to acquire and how to present it?”
In its appeal, the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Marcus, challenged Judge Edenfield’s contention that a library is a “limited, nonpublic forum,” claiming that the concept “reverses decades of constitutional jurisprudence,” according to the August 8 Fulton County Daily Report. The ACLU also argued that once the library “allowed citizens to indiscriminately place community information on its display table,” it could not withdraw that privilege out of “a desire to suppress a particular point of view.”
Posted August 18, 2003.