Utah’s Book Banning Law Claims Judy Blume, Five Other Female Authors As Its First Victims (original) (raw)

from the terrible-people-helping-other-terrible-people-be-more-terrible dept

Utah’s plans to erect a theocracy within the United States continue uninterrupted. While it’s always been more of a religious conclave than a US state for years, thanks to the outsized influence of the Mormon church, the past eight years have seen a much more dramatic drift to the far right of the political spectrum. Utah isn’t the only state in a hurry to violate long-held constitutional rights in the wake of the unexpected elevation of Donald Trump to the office of US president, but it’s definitely feeling a lot more comfortable letting its inherent biases guide its governance and legislation.

The state’s legislators have hung their hats on a slew of bills written with the sole intent of marginalizing anyone and anything not straight, conservative, white, and (if need be) devoutly religious. A theocracy is in the making. The only thing slowing it down is deciding which version of God should be considered the “official” version of God.

The state’s governor, Spencer Cox, has signed off on laws that ban drag shows, govern bathroom usage, and declare protected First Amendment expression illegal. Like several other states run by so-called “conservatives,” Utah has passed laws targeting social media companies and the content carried by public libraries.

All of these laws are being challenged in court, but one of the state’s many recent unconstitutional laws has paid off for the censorial crafters of these lawless laws. As Ella Creamer reports for The Guardian, the state’s book ban law, which went into effect at the beginning of last month, has paid off. Books certain people don’t like are now unavailable to anyone in public libraries across the state.

Books by Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur and Sarah J Maas are among 13 titles that the state of Utah has ordered to be removed from all public school classrooms and libraries.

This marks the first time a state has outlawed a list of books statewide, according to PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman, who oversees the organisation’s free expression programs.

Not exactly the sort of subversive material you’d expect people who claim to “care about the children” to target. Judy Blume, in particular, has been a well-respected mainstay in the tween/teen marketplace of ideas for decades.

As Creamer reports, the state law is the worst kind of law: one that allows a very small minority of people to decide what the rest of the state gets to read.Under the new law, all public school libraries must remove books if they are banned by as few as three of the state’s 41 school districts. This is nothing more than codification of the heckler’s veto — something that’s never not been considered antithetical to First Amendment rights. And those rights include a right to access content, not just create it.

The ban list enabled by the law makes it clear the censors are only targeting very specific content they don’t like, rather than doing anything at all to protect kids from accessing actually harmful content.

Twelve of the 13 titles were written by women. Six books by Maas, a fantasy author, appear on the list, along with Oryx and Crake by Atwood, Milk and Honey by Kaur and Forever by Blume. Two books by Ellen Hopkins appear, as well as Elana K Arnold’s What Girls Are Made Of and Craig Thompson’s Blankets.

Supposedly, these books contain “pornographic or indecent” material. But even pornography is protected by the First Amendment. And “indecent” content isn’t nearly the same thing as “obscene” content, which can be regulated without violating constitutional protections.

Unfortunately, this is just the way things will be going forward in a disturbingly large portion of the United States. Rights are no longer considered rights. They’re just something to be sacrificed on the many altars overseen by legislators who feel it’s not just an obligation, but a God-given duty, to impose their morality on others. Worse, there’s an alarming number of Americans who have enjoyed these freedoms for years cheering on each successive pressing of boot heels to throats, if only because it’s not their own throats at the moment.

But that’s why these rights should be protected by everyone. As the saying goes, if you give the government an inch, it will start to believe it’s a ruler. And that’s not what it is: it is there to serve the public, not the other way around. Cheering on the repression of certain people and ideas just because you don’t personally like them doesn’t make you a good American. It just makes you a shitty human being.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, book ban, censorship, free speech, spencer cox, utah