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Alianza Translatinx v. City of Huntington Beach

On February 26, 2025, three Huntington Beach residents, including two teenagers, along with the non-profit Alianza Translatinx, filed a lawsuit against city leaders for enacting a censorship scheme within the Huntington Beach Library System that directly violates the California Freedom to Read Act and the California Constitution.

In October 2023, the Huntington Beach City Council passed a resolution that called for “review of library materials containing sexual content” and restricted minors’ access to these materials. Through a subsequent ordinance, the city established a 21-member community review board with unappealable power to impose a censorial process over the library collection.  

These measures impede access to a wide range of topics including educational materials on gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, and reproductive health. The terms used in the measures sweep so broadly that they grant the community review board the unfettered power to restrict books for nearly any conceivable reason—or no reason at all.

For example, last February, the city moved the following literature to a restricted area of the library:

  • The children’s book Everyone Poops by Taro Gomi;  
  • The general science book The Way We Work: Getting to Know the Amazing Human Body by David Macaulay; and 
  • Rajani LaRocca’s Your One and Only Heart, a nonfiction picture book that explains the scientific importance of the human heart to children in poetic and lyrical terms. 

In particular, the measures violate the 2024 California Freedom to Read Act’s prohibition against making library procurement and circulation decisions based on “views, ideas, or opinions” expressed in the materials, as well as violating Library patrons’ right to receive information under the state constitution’s Liberty of Speech Clause and teen patrons’ constitutional right to privacy in their confidential library records. 

Filed in Orange County Superior Court by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, the First Amendment Coalition, Community Legal Aid SoCal, and Jenner & Block LLP, the lawsuit seeks to compel Huntington Beach to comply with the requirements of the Freedom to Read Act and the California Constitution and to prohibit the city from implementing and enforcing its censorship scheme. 

Press Release: Community Group and Huntington Beach Residents Sue City Over Library Censorship (2/27/2025)

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