Far too many states have decided to engage in censorship, urged on by an alarmingly large voting bloc that truly appears to be on the side of fascism, so long as that fascism appears to be on their side.
Since this is, for the moment, still the United States of America, home of several enshrined rights, most of these efforts have been scaled back, dismantled, or blocked completely following challenges in federal courts. Most, but not all. Some laws have survived, and those that have are likely going to be reviewed by a Supreme Court that has been deliberately stocked with the sort of people who think rights should be subservient to their favorite flavor of “conservatism.”
Fortunately, the burden of displacing these laws hasn’t been placed solely on residents of states run by bigoted lawmakers. Major publishers have stepped into the judicial breach. But this time, they’re using their litigation powers for good, rather than attempting to control access to literature by wielding their copyright law cudgels.
Multiple publishers have banded together once again to sue Florida over its censorial book-targeting laws. While not technically a book ban, the law accomplishes the same ends through slightly different means. But, at the end of the day, it’s still just censorship. And it’s still just as unconstitutional. Here’s Richard Luscombe, reporting for The Guardian from Miami, Florida.
“Florida HB 1069’s complex and overbroad provisions have created chaos and turmoil across the state, resulting in thousands of historic and modern classics, works we are proud to publish, being unlawfully labeled obscene and removed from shelves,” Dan Novack, vice-president and associate general counsel of Penguin Random House (PRH), said in a statement.
[…]
PRH is joined in the action by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster and Sourcebooks. The 94-page lawsuit, which also features as plaintiffs the Authors Guild and a number of individual writers, was filed in federal court in Orlando on Thursday.
The suit contends the book removal provisions violate previous supreme court decisions relating to reviewing works for their literary, artistic, political and scientific value as a whole while considering any potential obscenity; and seeks to restore the discretion “of trained educators to evaluate books holistically to avoid harm to students who will otherwise lose access to a wide range of viewpoints”.
The lawsuit targets “book removal provisions” that mainly target books kept in classes by teachers for access by their students, rather than school or other public libraries. Not that those entities aren’t affected. Books present in school libraries are also subject to challenges by state residents. But that’s the pretense that allows state government spokespeople to claim “book removal” mandates are not the same as “book bans.” After all, it’s not the government ordering removal. It’s simply schools and teachers responding to book challenges from other citizens.
“This is a stunt,” Florida Department of Education spokesperson Sydney Booker said in an email to The Hill. “There are no books banned in Florida. Sexually explicit material and instruction are not suitable for schools.”
In retrospect, I’m being far too fair to this government official. He doesn’t really respond to the lawsuit’s allegations. Instead, he crafts a new narrative that suggests the new law changes nothing about the long-held status quo. Sexually explicit material has never been suitable for schools. Therefore, the law being sued over is just… a redundancy?
Except that if it was the same as everything that’s come before it, librarians wouldn’t be pulling tons of books they’ve almost always felt comfortable giving students access to. And teachers wouldn’t be purging their classroom bookshelves of titles they’ve historically used for assigned reading or classroom instruction.
Since it went into effect last July, countless titles have been removed from elementary, middle and high school libraries, including American classics such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.
Contemporary novels by bestselling authors such as Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume and Stephen King have also been removed, as well as The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank’s gripping account of the Holocaust, according to the publishers.
The law prohibits books that “describe sexual content” from being made accessible to any student, whether they’re five or eighteen (the law regulates everything from kindergarten to 12th grade). It does not define the term “sexual content” with any specificity and the wording makes it clear that the context of the sexual content does not matter. Then it goes on to equate “sexual content descriptions” with pornography, which is already regulated and forbidden to be distributed to minors. And it goes without saying, no classroom or school library contains any actual pornography.
The first part of the law is so vague as to allow something as innocuous as the phrase “made love” to trigger the book removal process. The second part is redundant in the most stupid way — making something already illegal more illegal?
That’s the basis of the legal challenge [PDF] raised by the publishers, who note the poorly written, purely censorial law has already resulted in the removal of books long considered to be acceptable for most school-age readers. The plaintiffs want these two sections invalidated.
And they should be. They were clearly written by people blinded by their own bigotry — legislators who hope to purge the state’s schools of anything they don’t personally agree with. And they appear to be completely fine with the collateral damage caused by the badly written, unconstitutionally vague law — the disappearance of classic literature they’ve possibly even read and enjoyed themselves — so long as it definitely harms the stuff they hate.
