Florida has led the way in the practice of removing certain books deemed objectionable from its school libraries. It was inevitable that the various interpretations of the censorship, which range from the necessary protection of schoolchildren to a return of repressive puritanism, would move into the legal realm.
This week a number of major American publishers filed a suit in Orlando suing education officials in the state, arguing that the spate of book removals across the state stands in violation of the First Amendment. In other words they are determined to throw the book at it.
Ideological conflicts over what should be deemed suitable reading material for schoolchildren spans many states, but Florida has become emblematic of the issue since the signing of state legislature in 2022. Pen America, the leading advocate for full access to books and which monitors the statewide book withdrawals, has reported that the Sunshine state is responsible for some 72 per cent of the texts pulled from school library shelves this year. Florida is a brand leader, credited with the withdrawal of 3,135 of the 4,349 titles removed in the United States this year.
The purge began when Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, who may well file 2024 as the year in which he could not catch a break, signed legislation which permitted citizens to object to the availability of books they deemed objectionable in school libraries. The offending text would then be removed until such a time as a regulatory board reviewed and decided on its suitability. At the time the governor dismissed warnings that the legislation could lead to a plethora of objections and argued that the legislation was drafted in response to attempts to remove titles considered classics from school book shelves.
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“You have some groups that want to take away classic books like To Kill a Mockingbird, but they want things like, Gender Queer: A Memoir, which is a cartoon-style book with graphic images of children performing sexual acts. That is wrong,” DeSantis said. “They want to eliminate Of Mice and Men, but Lawn Boy, a book containing explicit passages of paedophilia, is somehow accepted.”
“The idea that someone can use the parents’ rights and the curriculum transparency to start objecting to every single book to try to make a mockery of this is just wrong,” he said the day before signing the bill. “That’s performative. That’s political.”
Whether it is political or stems from the concern over reading material available to children is moot. The publishers’ lawsuit claims that the legislation has inculcated “a regime of strict censorship in school libraries”. De Santis’s Democratic rivals accused him of pandering to his conservative political support base to support what proved to be a short-lived presidential campaign.
But it’s a decision that has led to unfilled real estate on many school libraries. Pen America reported that a staggering 1,600 books have been “banned” or withdrawn in Escambia County alone, including five dictionaries, the Guinness Book of World Records, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and biographies of Oprah Winfrey and supreme court justice Thurgood Marshall. Some 23 Stephen King novels are gone, along with works of fiction by authors ranging from Cormac McCarthy to James Patterson.
Still, the idea that thousands of Floridians, of whatever political and ideological hue, are rushing to object to this and that title is not the case. It has emerged that more than 60 per cent of all challenges to books across the United States came from 11 people.
Florida’s most prolific objector is Bruce Friedman from Clay County, who has sponsored one third of all challenges in the state and for more than 90 per cent of those in his district, leaving the Clay County school board addled with the sheer volume and energy of his approach. During one school meeting he was escorted from the podium after repeatedly trying to read excerpts from a novel about the opioid crisis to substantiate his point.
Friedman is a bibliophile and argues that his objections are founded in his determination that “all lessons in all schools” will “respect innocence”. One member of the school board has publicly taken his side, maintaining that every book banned was “filthy, filthy pornography” and pointing out that “people who tell you different have not read the books, period”.
The contentious issue has itself become an inspiration for a children’s book Ban This Book by Alan Gratz, about a fourth grade student named Amy who creates a secret banned book club in her school. It was published in 2017, and seemed like the perfect middle ground for students to debate the issue. But the Indian River County district board in Florida thought differently. Following an objection it was banned.