You can’t say this word in some movies. But you can put it in a sign for all to see.

A year ago, my home county of Botetourt — like many others — was roiled by a controversy over library books. The specific concern was that children could walk into any county library and, with no supervision, find books that some considered obscene — and which certainly had some sexual content.

The group BRACE — Botetourt Residents Against Child Exploitation — said it was not advocating book banning. “What we ARE proposing,” the group says on its website, “is the establishment of sensible and reasonable community standards. … And this is not about free speech. The Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment does not protect obscenity .”

People can differ about whether the books in question — the group listed 26 on its website, many with LGBTQ+ themes — are, indeed, obscene. However, we as a society have generally agreed that not everything is appropriate for all age groups. That’s why we have age-based ratings on movies, for instance. It’s why we have age-based systems for lots of other things: buying tobacco, buying alcohol, visiting a casino. I’ve not heard anyone ever dispute those. At one point there was a proposal that only those 18 and older could visit a Botetourt library unless accompanied by an adult (with exceptions for 16- and 17-year-olds who had written permission). In effect, Botetourt libraries would be branded with an age rating similar to movies. That proposal never went into effect, but it was debated by the Botetourt County Board of Supervisors. While that might have been extreme, many other library systems have age limits — just lower ones — although it’s unclear how much of that deals with kids accessing inappropriate content and how much is just the general notion that the younger a child, the more supervision they need.

In any case, it’s been conservatives who have driven the library debates across the state, and across the country.

That’s why I was so stunned recently when I was driving down U.S. 220 through Botetourt County — certainly a conservative county if you go by election returns — and I saw a new sign fluttering from someone’s new fence.

“F— Biden,” it proclaimed, except without the dashes.

This is not the first time I’ve seen such a slogan. I’ve seen it on flags flying in other counties; I’ve seen it on bumper stickers. It just hits differently when I drive past it just a few miles from my home.

I am certainly not here to defend President Joe Biden. I suspect most voters have already come to their own conclusions about his performance and don’t need my help. If someone feels strongly about him in a negative way, they’re obviously not alone.

I do wonder, though, why those who are conservative think it’s wise to display such a sign in full view of, well, anyone who passes by.

I realize these may not be the same conservatives as those who are concerned about library books. However, it seems strange to me that someone can be concerned about a child (who likely had to get transported to the library by an adult and could still have an adult nearby) might reach onto a library shelf and open a closed book to find something objectionable — and not concerned by those same children might be riding down the road and see this sign. “Hey, Mommy, what does F— Biden mean?”

There are certainly lots of ways to express unhappiness with our 46th president. I hate to sound like a prude, but why must some use that word — and in such a public way? Is this consistent with “family values”?

Under our movie ratings system, a G-rated movie can’t use that word at all.

A PG-13 movie is allowed to use it once — and only once, and in a non-sexual way.

Use it twice and you get an R rating.

Under that scale, driving down U.S. 220 north of Fincastle should get a PG-13 rating.

(Fun fact: The musical “Hamilton” uses that word three times. To get the movie version onto Disney Plus, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda dropped two of them .)

So why isn’t this sign — and others like it — a violation of Virginia’s obscenity laws? State code section § 18.2-377 specifically says: “It shall be unlawful for any person knowingly to expose, place, display, post up, exhibit, paint, print, or mark, or cause to be exposed, placed, displayed, posted, exhibited, painted, printed or marked, in or on any building, structure, billboard, wall or fence, or on any street, or in or upon any public place, any placard, poster, banner, bill, writing, or picture which is obscene …”

That begs the question: Is that word obscene?

Those of a certain age may remember that the comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested multiple times on obscenity charges for using that word and several others. Once, he was arrested for using the word “schmuck.” When he died in 1964, he was free on bail pending appeal after being found guilty and sentenced to four months in the workhouse. George Carlin later popularized “the seven words you can’t say on television,” although there was never such a specific list of banned words (although the words he used would have caused trouble for any broadcast license-holder).

Today we live in coarser times and certain words have become more commonplace. Not until “M*A*S*H” in 1970 did an American movie use that word; by 2013 “The Wolf of Wall Street” used it 569 times and was called “brilliant” by The New Yorker. It earned an 8.2 rating (out of a possible 10) on IMDb, the Internet Movie Database.

There’s also the small matter of the First Amendment. In 2021, a woman in Roselle Park, New Jersey, put up multiple signs expressing her dissatisfaction with Biden, many of them of a crude nature. One of them used the phrase I saw on the fence near Fincastle. The township charged her with obscenity and she was found guilty. The American Civil Liberties Union took up her case, appealed, and the state’s Superior Court overturned her conviction. (For conservatives who don’t like the ACLU, here’s a gentle reminder that the ACLU takes up cases across the political spectrum.) The relevant case governing such things is the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Cohen v. California, where a witness in a court case was charged with disturbing the peace because his jacket was emblazoned to read: “F— the draft.” Again, without the dashes.

The court ruled 5-4 that Paul Robert Cohen had been wrongly charged and convicted. The majority opinion was written by a conservative justice, John Harlan, and contains a lengthy exposition on the word in question. “Much has been made of the claim that Cohen’s distasteful mode of expression was thrust upon unwilling or unsuspecting viewers, and that the state might therefore legitimately act as it did in order to protect the sensitive from otherwise unavoidable exposure to appellant’s crude form of protest,” Harlan wrote. “Of course, the mere presumed presence of unwitting listeners or viewers does not serve automatically to justify curtailing all speech capable of giving offense.”

Harlan went on to write that if you’re outside, you have to be prepared to see things you might find objectionable. “Those in the Los Angeles courthouse could effectively avoid further bombardment of their sensibilities simply by averting their eyes.”

Harlan declared that the right of free expression is so important to our society that while the word in question might be distasteful, a larger principle is at stake. “Surely the State has no right to cleanse public debate to the point where it is grammatically palatable to the most squeamish among us,” he wrote. “For, while the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless often true that one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”

That’s why my neighbors can put up a sign with such a vulgarity in full view of any passing school bus in a county where some are worried about those same kids finding something objectionable in the library.

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