a maryland judge put a gay graphic novel back on the school library shelf. moms for liberty called it totalitarianism. sure, babe.

The Harford County Courthouse in Bel Air, Maryland. Photo: Farragutful, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Baltimore Banner and CBS News Baltimore

When the Harford County school board filed its appeal last November, its own lawyer, Gregory Szoka, said: "I think the chances of succeeding on the appeal are less than 20%," The Baltimore Banner reports. The board appealed anyway. On Thursday, it found out he was being generous.

Harford County Circuit Court Judge Yolanda L. Curtin ruled that the board's June 2025 decision to pull "Flamer," Mike Curato's graphic novel about being bullied as a kid for being gay, from school libraries violated Maryland's Freedom to Read Act and the First Amendment. "This court finds that the decision by the state board was not arbitrary, unreasonable or illegal," she said, per the Banner. CBS News Baltimore reports it is the first time the 2024 law has been tested in court.

what the judge ruled

The book went through exactly the process Harford set up for it. A parent asked in November 2024 to have it removed, arguing it didn't "meet the values of the community." A review committee of parents, students and staff read it and voted to keep it, and the superintendent agreed. Then the elected board voted 5-3, in a private meeting, to take it out anyway, the Banner reports. The state school board reversed that last fall, the first time it had ever stepped into a local book decision, and Harford went to court.

The board's argument, per the Banner, was that it could overrule the committee using its "collective understanding." Curtin's answer: "It's got to be following what the state law is." According to both outlets, she said the board had swapped in its own opinions for the process, which is the thing the law exists to stop.

how moms for liberty took it

The audience cheered when the judge left the room, the Banner reports. Moms for Liberty Harford County did not. In a statement CBS News Baltimore carried after the ruling, the group said: "When a county school board can't even decide what books should be in their libraries, we have reached totalitarianism."

For the record, the board could decide. It decided the wrong way, against its own committee and its own superintendent, in a room the public was not in, and a judge said so. That is not totalitarianism. That is a library with a returns policy.

Board president Lauren Paige did not immediately respond to either outlet, and CBS reports it is unclear whether the board will appeal again. We have been keeping score on library fights all fall, from a Tennessee librarian's lawsuit to a North Carolina library's vanishing rainbow logo. Put this one in the win column.