A federal judge Monday tossed out parts of an Arkansas state law that allowed librarians and booksellers to be sent to prison for up to a year for allowing minors to access “obscene” or “harmful” materials, whatever local officials might decide is “obscene” or “harmful.” Probably gay penguins.

In his ruling, US District Judge Timothy Brooks found that the law, Act 372, violated the First Amendment and also generally sucked, was overly vague, and didn’t provide adequate guidance to libraries and booksellers to help them avoid being arbitrarily prosecuted. The law created a new process for complaints and required libraries (tell you what, just assume “and booksellers” is part of every sentence, OK?) to shelve “harmful” materials in a special adults-only section, although it didn’t mandate that such a section be behind a beaded curtain like at an old video store. A similar law in Idaho — minus the librarian-jailing — is also being challenged in federal court, as are multiple other censorship laws.

Brooks wrote that the law “deputizes librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship; when motivated by the fear of jail time, it is likely they will shelve only books fit for young children and segregate or discard the rest,” which was of course the point. For all the Mad Moms’ insistence that they only want to protect tiny innocent kids from “obscene” materials, the actual targets of book banning tend to be anything rightwing parents dislike, especially mentions of LGBTQ people, books about race, and sex education.

Not surprisingly, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said that while he’ll respect the ruling, he plans to appeal, and Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement calling Act 372 “just common sense” because “schools and libraries shouldn’t put obscene material in front of our kids,” so there.

Holly Dickson, executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas, said yippee, now we can poison kids’ minds, destroy the family, and kill God, or at least that’s how wingnuts will interpret what she actually said, which was

“This was an attempt to ‘thought police,’ and this victory over totalitarianism is a testament to the courage of librarians, booksellers, and readers who refused to bow to intimidation.”

Judge Brooks found that the law hadn’t adequately defined “harmful to minors” and that it would “invite censorship decisions on the basis of content.” He noted that while the state “helpfully offers the dictionary definitions” of several terms like “present,” “furnish,” or “make available,” the definitions by themselves didn’t really help, since they didn’t make clear how much action would be adequate to avoid prosecution.

If a book with some sexual content were placed on a shelf or otherwise displayed in the teen or adult section of the library or bookstore, the librarian or bookseller could reasonably be accused of “furnishing a harmful item to a minor” if a younger minor could access it.

The only way to absolutely avoid being prosecuted and sent to prison for a year, he reasoned, would be to “burden older minors’ and adults’ access to books that contain even a modicum of sexual content” on the off chance that a preschooler might wander into the existing grownup nonfiction stacks and bring back a copy of, let’s say, Fear of Flying or an accurate journalistic report on the threesome frolics of Moms for Liberty cofounder Bridget Ziegler and related alleged rape investigation into her husband, Christian Ziegler, who wasn’t prosecuted but was shitcanned as Florida GOP chair.

Or maybe libraries and bookstores could just ban kids who aren’t accompanied by a parent at all times, as has happened in some places.

Brooks also found that, despite the claims of its backers that Act 372 was only meant to protect children from all that porn that already isn’t in libraries, the law doesn’t define “appropriateness” at all, leaving it up to local committees:

“Material subject to challenge is not limited to sexual content, and the law does not define ‘appropriateness’ at all,” Brooks wrote. “Instead, a book challenger may target any expression of ideas that he or she personally deems inappropriate.”

The law also didn’t require a challenger to be a library user, to have read the material being challenged, or even to be an Arkansas resident, leaving the law open to abuse, which was the point to begin with.

Here’s hoping that Judge Brooks’s ruling is just the first of many to follow as more Americans decide they’d rather not be ruled by a minority of rightwing creeps, the end.

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[Arkansas Advocate / Ruling in Fayetteville Public Library v. Crawford County / AP]

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Book Us, Danno

Here to warm your heart a little bit is a fable about a magical land called the US Congress, where in the midst of last week’s huge stupid fight about whether to actually have a government anymore, and about whether unelected weirdo billionaires should be able to destroy said government, the Senate passed a little-noticed bill that will update American child welfare laws for the first time in 15 years and help out kids in foster care.

As Gabe Fleisher at Wake Up To Politics points out, there weren’t any big culture war provisions in the bill, and somehow the flaky billionaire with an online propaganda factory didn’t catch wind of it, so the Supporting America’s Children and Families Act passed and was signed into law without getting much attention at all. In fact, when Fleischer wrote about it over the weekend, he noted that “as far as I can tell, not a single other article has been written about this legislation by any news outlet, anywhere.”

Fleischer included a google link so people could check, and I did. Even after his post, nope, nothing much, apart from several social media posts linking to Fleisher, plus the expected press releases from members of Congress who helped pass the bill. The only exception we found was a Yahoo reprint of a brief story from Native News Online, based on a press release from the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA), which advocated for the law because it

increases funding for tribal child welfare programs and courts, reduces administrative burdens, closes a gap in data collection for Native children and families who are in state child welfare systems, and requires the Department of Health and Human Services with the assistance of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to provide needed technical assistance to states and tribal nations to improve implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act.

So there’s a second article, and now Yr Wonkette makes three. Maybe some bigger outlets should cover this, although that might run the risk of bringing it to the attention of some jerk who thinks kids in the system have it too easy and need to be working overnight shifts.

As Fleisher — who staunchly refuses to have a c in his name no matter how often I misspell it — points out, there are some excellent things in the bill beyond the increase of $75 million a year into the budget for “the federal program tasked with combatting child abuse/neglect and protecting children in the foster care system.”

Among other things, the bill allows states to pass on federal child welfare funds directly to families that have hit an economic rough patch, to “prevent children from being separated from parents solely on the basis of poverty-related circumstances” — instead of declaring the parents “neglectful” and taking their kids away.

Other measures in the law will

expand mental health services for children in foster care; ease the transition out of foster care by offering assistance to former foster children until they reach the age of 26; increase funding for the 2.5 million grandparents and relatives raising children who would otherwise go into foster care; create a new requirement that states consult with affected children and parents when crafting their child welfare policies; seek to improve the relationships between incarcerated parents and their children in foster care; and reduce the administrative burden of child welfare caseworkers by 15%, so they can focus more on children and less on paperwork.

That’s a hell of a lot of good that literally got zero mention in the mainstream press, mostly because the bill was written and passed without any drama or denunciations that it would promote witchcraft, turn children into communists, or force Americans to live under the tyranny of the Metric System. And that, Fleisher says, is a damn shame, because “coverage of the country’s legislative output should not be dictated by how much squabbling went into the passage of the bill.” A media focus on dysfunction might be entertaining, but leads to cynicism and to people never hearing about genuinely worthwhile, honest-to-Crom “bipartisan achievements like the Supporting America’s Children and Families Act.”

We think Fleisher is right, though we’d also add that it would sure help a hell of a lot if our politicians, especially those on one side of the aisle, would actually try to legislate instead of trying to get their scowling faces on Fox News. Oh dear, that wasn’t bipartisan of me at all.

OPEN THREAD.

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[Wake Up to Politics]

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BOTH SIDES of your credit card matter

In Saint-Flour, a town in the Auvergne region of central France, the highest cathedral in Europe perches at 892 meters (nearly 3,000 feet) above sea level. Saint-Pierre sits at the confluence of the dry winds blowing across the surrounding plateaus, making it, surprisingly, the ideal place to age local hams to perfection.

This church-aged charcuterie was the brainchild of Philippe Boyer, who became rector of Saint-Pierre in 2011. Soon thereafter, he encountered his first challenge: The 600-year-old cathedral was in need of some TLC, specifically for its 19th-century choir organ. Repairs would cost several thousand euros, money no one had: not the diocese, and certainly not the French state, despite technically owning 87 of the country’s cathedrals, including Saint-Pierre.

Boyer was undeterred. “I said to myself, ‘Why not make a product in the spirit of the great medieval abbeys, who made their own food, which they sold to survive, to live?’” he says. “In this case, it’s not for us to live, but to give new life to heritage.”

Boyer began by adding beehives to the cathedral roof, and, following the success of the resulting honey, he turned his attention to one of the region’s star products: Jambon d’Auvergne, a ham boasting a protected status similar to Champagne or Roquefort. Typically aged in drying rooms for eight to 12 months, these hams, Boyer figured, could easily be aged instead in the cathedral’s breezy north tower.

He mentioned the idea to a reporter from local newspaper La Montagne, and the article caught the attention of farm cooperative Altitude. “We thought the idea was pretty original, pretty iconoclastic,” recalls Altitude communications manager Thierry Bousseau, noting that the group also thought the project would be the ideal way of promoting the work of their farmers and salaisonniers, experts in the art of curing and aging charcuterie like sausages and hams.

A host of bureaucratic hurdles loomed, including authorizations from French health services and the certifying board granting the hams IGP (Indication Geographique Protégée) status. And of course, the architecte des bâtiments de France, a civil servant devoted to the protection of state-owned buildings, had to be consulted. “He gave his OK,” says Bousseau, and so, in June 2022, Bishop Didier Noblot officially invoked the protection of Saint Antoine, patron of charcutiers, in blessing the first hams.

Today, hams produced by one of Altitude’s 30 farms are first aged in the cooperative’s aging rooms. Only the best are selected for sale to the Association des Amis de la Cathédrale, whose volunteers meet weekly to replenish the supply, carrying each ten-kilo (around 22 pounds) ham up the 150-odd steps of the spiral staircase to the tower. Here, they’re swaddled in bags and suspended from hooks just beneath the 19th-century bells. About 50 hams hang here at any given time, dry-aged for at least two months under the watchful eye of Patrice Boulard, a member of the Association and an expert salaisonnier with Altitude. The environment, he says, makes for a superlative ham. “It’s like in the olden days,” he says, “when in the French countryside, they’d age in the barn.”

The Association sells each ham for about 150 euros; proceeds have thus far funded not just the organ’s restoration but the purchase of a new Gospel Book made by the master goldsmith Goudji.

Altitude’s expertise means the hams are far from a gimmick. Their meaty wares show up on Michelin-starred tables such as Guy Savoy’s in Paris or Régis et Jacques Marcon's in Saint-Bonnet-le-Froid. “It was really important to us,” says Bousseau, “that this ham, which we age longer than most, which we choose in our workshop, be approved of by reputed chefs.”

But after just a few months, the project hit a snag. The new architecte des bâtiments de France noticed grease stains on the floor below the hams, and, Boyer recalls, “he started to panic.” The stains were easily explained by the fact that the bells are greased every six months, but, fueled perhaps by the memory of Notre-Dame’s 2019 conflagration, the architect dubbed the hams a fire hazard. “Hams don’t catch fire, just like that,” protests Boyer. But the group was nevertheless forced through yet another series of bureaucratic hoops. Six months after adopting new protocols, things seemed to have settled, Bousseau recalls. “And then in October 2023, we got a letter.”

By this point, Boyer had been transferred to nearby Aurillac, so it was the new vicar, Jean-Paul Rolland, who received the news: The changes had been deemed insufficient, and effective immediately, the hams had to be removed.

But Rolland took advantage of the bureaucratic tangle in forming his response. “He decided that the diocese, as the renter of the space, was not responsible for what happened in the cathedral,” says Bousseau. “He got the message across that basically, the hams weren’t going anywhere.”

These days, the status of the project is “a bit convoluted,” admits Bousseau. “Officially, aging the hams is illegal, but the reality is that they’re still there.” And despite their novelty, they’ve become beloved among locals. “Saint-Florins have appropriated them,” he says, “as though they had always been.”

The group remains optimistic for the future of the hams, especially following Notre-Dame’s 700 million-euro restoration. Funding these state-owned religious buildings has become a topic du jour, with Minister of Culture Rachida Dati even floating the idea of charging entry to the Parisian cathedral, an idea that was ultimately abandoned. Nevertheless, according to Bousseau, “there’s a contradiction regarding the announcements made by the state. ‘We can’t finance our heritage.’ And then we, at the local level, find solutions, and there’s a civil servant putting a wrench in the works.”

Dati agreed. In late October, the Minister of Culture voiced her official support of the hams.

For Bousseau, this project is “just a drop in the bucket” when it comes to the problem of funding France’s heritage. But this marriage of culture and cuisine shows how a little ingenuity and cooperation can help preserve history.

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As a team we had a Secret Santa last week; and after the exchanges were done, we sat down to serious work: recording how Ukrainian- and English-speaking people represent farm animal sounds verbally.

You might suggest that this is a cunning way for us to avoid writing an extensive, deeply-reported article during the holidays.

To that I would say: how dare you. ;)

Merry Christmas,
Tim and the rest of the Counteroffensive team.

shoku-and-awe:

This screenshot from a gardening Facebook group has been on my phone for several years and I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to delete it. Apparently it comes from a British gardening book from the 80s. I know we all joke that the English are afraid of flavor, but I assure you, you are not prepared for this.

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The complex derivative guys are given AAA ratings then surprised that they still sink.