Attorney General Alan Wilson leads 17-state brief supporting efforts to exclude racially or sexually divisive materials from public schools

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) – South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson announced today that he is leading a 17-state effort to support state lawmakers’ efforts to keep racially or sexually divisive materials out of public schools.

“Our schools are supposed to be places of learning and collaboration, not indoctrination into woke ideologies that assign blame or condemnation based on race or sex,” Attorney General Wilson said.

The South Carolina legislature passed a budget proviso that says the state Department of Education cannot use state money for any instructional materials that teach that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex, or that someone is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive by virtue of their race or sex. (You can read the Budget Proviso here.)

The South Carolina NAACP, two authors, a teacher, and several students filed a lawsuit to block the proviso, arguing that it violates their First Amendment rights. The attorneys general filed a friend-of-the-court brief in that lawsuit supporting lawmakers’ right to decide which materials belong in public schools.

The attorneys general argue that the Court doesn’t need to endorse the state’s restriction on racially or sexually divisive materials in public schools as sound public policy, only that it needs to follow precedent that says the selection, curation, and placement of educational materials in public schools is a form of government speech.

“A citizen’s right to receive information under the First Amendment is not a right to compel or extract information from the government at the taxpayers’ expense. Accordingly, there is no First Amendment right to compel state-funded schools to implement certain course curricula or require public school libraries to stock their bookshelves with inflammatory and prejudicial materials,” the attorneys general write in their brief.

They also argue that the proviso does not prevent anyone from receiving that information, but rather prevents children from accessing the material in public schools at taxpayers’ expense.

They ask the Court to deny the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction and dismiss the case, holding that the plaintiffs are unlikely to succeed on their First Amendment claims.

Joining Attorney General Wilson in the brief are the attorneys general from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.

You can read their brief here.