(The Lion) — A federal judge has blocked an Arkansas law that allows for prosecution of librarians and booksellers who provide pornographic materials to minors.

Top Republicans in the state said they would fight the ruling.

This week’s decision by Obama judge Timothy Brooks strikes down key provisions of recently passed Arkansas Act 372 that would impose criminal penalties for knowingly distributing pornographic materials to a minor, especially as it relates to schools and libraries.

The law merely seeks to eliminate the disparity between schools or libraries and members of the public – the latter of whom are already subject to prosecution for proffering porn to kids.

Indeed, under current law teachers and librarians are exempted from prohibitions on the distribution of pornographic material to children – bans that apply to the rest of the community, said the new law’s prime sponsor.

The sponsor, Republican state Sen. Dan Sullivan, said the whole purpose of the law was to eliminate the deliberate “carve-out” that liberals created to exempt teachers and librarians from existing laws that count distribution of obscene material as a criminal act.

“After all, we don’t exempt pharmacists from drug-dealing laws, slaughterhouses from animal cruelty laws, and doctors from sexual-assault laws,” said Sullivan. “Yet prior to my bill, teachers and librarians, who are the closest to our children, were 100% legally free to provide children obscene material at their jobs.”

The suit challenging Act 372 was brought by the liberal American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), according to the Associated Press.

The ACLU in recent years has oddly favored controversial anti-civil liberty ideologies championed by progressives, such as vaccine mandates and bans on anti-transgender beliefs – but has unabashedly embraced the widespread distribution of pornography to children as a First Amendment right.

Judge Brooks narrowly sided with the ACLU, writing in a 37-page ruling that content restrictions written into the law are overly broad and vague.

“When it comes to children, it is well established that ‘minors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection’ that the government may restrict ‘only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances,’” wrote Brooks.

Brooks also said the rights of others besides minors would be damaged by implementation of the law.

“If the General Assembly’s purpose in passing Section 1 [of Act 372] was to protect younger

minors from accessing inappropriate sexual content in libraries and bookstores, the law

will only achieve that end at the expense of everyone else’s First Amendment rights,” the judge wrote.

The judge ruled the state was permanently enjoined from enforcing those sections of the law dealing with: the nature of the obscene content; the process of reviewing content; and the definition of distributing obscene content.

The decision leaves open the possibility that the legislature could go back and amend the law with more specificity to address the judge’s concerns.

Arkansas Republicans said they would appeal the decision as a matter of common sense, in any event.

“Act 372 is just common sense: schools and libraries shouldn’t put obscene material in front of our kids,” Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement to KATV-TV. “I will work with Attorney General [Tim] Griffin to appeal this ruling and uphold Arkansas law.”

Griffin, for his part, kept his statement brief.

“I respect the court’s ruling and will appeal,” Griffin, a Republican, said in a statement to the AP.

Because Brooks cited previous U.S. Supreme Court decisions, it’s likely the ruling will have an effect on other states that try to control the distribution of obscene materials for children through schools and libraries. Some fear other liberal judges will use Brooks’ opinion as a backstop for their own rulings striking down anti-porn laws affecting minors.

For example, liberals in the Biden administration used the 2020 Bostock ruling that narrowly protected gay people from workplace discrimination to justify an expansion of LGBTQ rights, which previously didn’t exist, such as forced pronoun usage.