Florida

Judge Carnes Fiddles; Meanwhile, Our Schools.....

Oy -- I could have guessed the result when I saw that Judge Carnes authored the Vamos a Cuba decision reversing Judge Gold's reasonable and measured ruling:

In a 2-1 decision, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta said the board did not breach the First Amendment, and ordered a Miami federal judge to lift a preliminary injunction that had allowed Vamos a Cuba to be checked out from school libraries.

The majority opinion supported the School Board's authority to set educational standards in Miami-Dade, saying the bilingual book, part of a library series on 24 nations, presented an ''inaccurate'' view of life in Cuba under its former leader, Fidel Castro.

''The record shows that the board did not simply dislike the ideas in the Vamos a Cuba book,'' appeals court Judge Ed Carnes wrote in the majority opinion. 'Instead, everyone, including both sides' experts, agreed that the book contained factual inaccuracies.''

But the three-judge panel's opinion -- not unlike the School Board's initial vote -- was so fraught with political rhetoric such as ''book banning'' that further appeals seem inevitable. Indeed, Carnes attacked the dissenting opinion's use of the phrase.

''That is a faulty foundation,'' he wrote in the 177-page ruling. ``The board did not ban any book. The board removed from its own school libraries a book that the board had purchased for those libraries with board funds. It did not prohibit anyone else from owning, possessing or reading the book.''

The ruling, written by Carnes and joined by U.S. District Judge Donald Walter of the Western District of Louisiana, concluded that the School Board also did not violate the due process rights of the American Civil Liberties Union.