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The Dirty Cowboy by Amy Timberlake.

The National Coalition Against Censorship has entered the fray surrounding the Annville-Cleona School Board's banning of the award-winning children's book "The Dirty Cowboy."

The NCAC on Tuesday sent a letter to the members of the board, expressing the coalition's concern over the decision to remove the book and urging the board to return the book to the district's libraries.

View the letter here.

The school board will meet at 7:30 p.m. Thursday.

The letter was signed by NCAC executive director Joan Bertin and Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression.

The letter notes that the objection upon which the ban was based was to "nudity" in the book, although sensitive areas of the body are not depicted. Regardless, the letter points out, simple nudity is fully protected by the First Amendment.

"There is no salacious or sexually suggestive content in the book - it is merely an amusing story of a cowboy taking his annual bath, getting even dirtier in the process," the letter states. "As the Supreme Court has observed on numerous occasions, " 'nudity alone' does not place otherwise protected material outside the mantle of the First Amendment."

The letter also states that school officials are bound by constitutional considerations, including a duty not to give in to pressure to suppress language or images deemed controversial or offensive by some.

According to the letter, the Supreme Court has cautioned that school officials "may not remove books from library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to 'prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.'"

Read more from the original source:
Anti-censorship group weighs in on 'The Dirty Cowboy' ban