A group of Huntington Beach residents, including two teenagers, and a local nonprofit filed a lawsuit this week against the city to eliminate several measures passed by councilmembers to restrict access to children’s books deemed inappropriate at city libraries, calling it a “censorship scheme.”
The lawsuit argues the city has violated the state’s newly enacted Freedom to Read Act by moving some children’s books to a restricted area of the library and setting out to create a book review board that would have the “unfettered power to restrict books for nearly any conceivable reason — or no reason at all,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit, filed in Orange County Superior Court on Feb. 26, asks for a judge to force the city to comply with the Freedom to Read Act and not continue with restricting access to some children’s books and to not implement its book review board. The suit was filed by two unnamed Huntington Beach high school students, Erin Spivey, a librarian in Orange County, and Alianza Translatinx, a nonprofit that supports transgender people in the county.
“Libraries should reflect, not erase, and be spaces where young people can discover who they are,” CEO of Alianza Translatinx Khloe Rios-Wyatt said in a news release. “Huntington Beach officials, driven by fear of challenging ideas, are trying to erase stories and identities — but we refuse to be erased.”
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The Freedom to Read Act went into effect on Jan. 1. The California law prevents library boards from banning or limiting the circulation of books and other materials because of the views, ideas or opinions in them or because they contain sexual content.
The lawsuit cites “Everyone Poops,” “The Way We Work: Getting to Know the Amazing Human Body” and “Your One and Only Heart” as examples of books the city library has moved to a restricted area.
Mayor Pat Burns said the city disagrees with the statements made in a news release announcing the lawsuit, saying “the city has maintained its stance that no books have been banned or removed from the library.”
“The safety, wellness and protection of our community, children, and library patrons remains our primary goal,” Burns said in his statement. “We will not be deterred by this lawsuit in maintaining this goal and the City Attorney’s Office intends to aggressively defend our city’s best interests.”
Two of the plaintiffs in the suit are listed as unnamed Huntington Beach high school students. One of them is a 15-year-old who has checked out books from the city that involve kissing, which could be seen as “sexual content” under the city’s library policies and made restricted, according to the lawsuit.
In January 2024, the city’s library staff were told to use the Wikipedia definition of sexual content to find library materials that needed to be removed from the children’s section, according to the lawsuit. At the Central Library, books were then moved to the fourth floor with a sign stating they were “Youth Restricted Books” and required an adult library card or special youth card to check out.
The lawsuit is the latest challenge trying to overturn the city’s children’s book review board.
The City Council on Tuesday is set to consider whether to place a ballot initiative that would eliminate the law before voters in a special election in the coming months or in the November 2026 general election. A group of residents collected enough signatures to force the public vote on the review board.
The children’s book review board, which has not yet been formed, would be made up of 21 members appointed by the City Council, as the law is written. It would have the power, by majority vote, to block the purchase of new library books it deems inappropriate and move children’s books already in circulation to a restricted area of the library.
“For young people especially, freedom of thought begins with the freedom to read,” said David Loy, the First Amendment Coalition’s legal director, in a news release. “To read is to explore and learn — to see one’s experience reflected by others or to imagine oneself in the shoes of another. The government has no business standing in the way of young people as they grow into adulthood by reading about the diverse experiences of the world around them.”