book bans – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Don’t Forget That The Same People Banning Books Want To Ban Porn

from the umm-no-shit-Sherlock dept

PEN America published recent data on book bans and removals just in time for Banned Books Week.

Key findings indicate that most books challenged by censorship advocates this past year focus on LGBTQ+ subject matter. Additionally, Iowa and Florida are currently the two worst states for book bans amid Republican-backed content restriction laws.

The PEN America data indicates that more than 10,000 books were removed from the shelves of school libraries across the country during the 2023-2024 academic year. The tally of removed books climbed triple-fold from last year’s tally of 3,362 removals.

Also, the American Library Association’s latest data additionally tracked 695 ban attempts with 1,915 unique titles challenged. Challenges, per this dataset, showed a slight decrease but further substantiated the finding concluded by PEN that most books targeted dealt with LGBTQ+ materials or sexuality.

These are sobering tallies as we draw ever closer to the 2024 presidential election and the number of civil liberties concerns riding on the final result. While Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have their own concerning positions, like Harris’ inconsistencies on FOSTA-SESTA and Section 230, the real concern, unsurprisingly, is on the Republican ticket, Donald Trump and JD Vance.

Trump and Vance offer a very real opportunity for the Heritage Foundation’s fascist Project 2025 to become a reality.

And, some of the key proposals outlined by Project 2025’s policy document, Mandate for Leadership, deal with adopting laws that could strip the First Amendment rights of millions of individuals. I wrote for Techdirt awhile back about the project’s effort to outlaw “pornography.”

Kevin Roberts, current president of the Heritage Foundation and now-alleged dog killer, wrote:

“Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today:…children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”

“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection.”

“Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as an illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”

“Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders…“

Considering his words, the ‘Project 2025-worldview’ is a feigned belief held by far-right MAGA populists that young adult literature featuring a gender-diverse protagonist is tantamount to a feature film streaming on Brazzers.

And, it reminds us that those who are pushing book bans are also pushing laws that restrict consensual and legal online porn through inequitable age verification laws.

It’s an inconvenient, but unsurprising, truth. Consider Russell Vought of the Center for Renewing America as an example.

Vought is a Christian nationalist and former Trump administration official. His center previously published model legislation that would implement age verification requirements on virtually all websites with content the sponsor deems to be obscene or indecent to minors.

That model legislation was drafted in a way to justify age-gating and censorship of material that isn’t even legally considered “porn.” A case can even be made that this model legislation could be used to age-gate access to information about reproductive rights or LGBTQ+ mental health.

Vought was caught on hidden camera by undercover journalists not that long ago. He was pitching Project 2025 to the journalists posing as potential donors.

During the conversation, he said they intend to ban porn through a “back door.” The “back door” he refers to is the adoption of legislation that mandates age verification, like what was adopted in Texas. As I’ve covered extensively in my reporting and analysis, Texas lawmakers adopted House Bill (HB) 1181 in 2023.

Adult industry stakeholders, led by the Free Speech Coalition, sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to block the enforcement of HB 1181.

After a sordid litigation history in district court and the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton has developed into a landmark First Amendment case with broad implications.

Figures like Vought have openly advocated for book bans in addition to age verification measures that specifically target porn. And they do so without regard for the First Amendment.

An amicus brief filed in support of the Free Speech Coalition and the porn companies in the pending Supreme Court case makes this argument.

The amicus brief, filed on behalf of literary rights groups and book publishers, highlights the overlapping nature of book bans and age verification requirements.

The brief argues, “At a moment in which the political appetite for book banning is at an upswing, scaling back the searching review of such content-based restrictions poses an especially concrete threat to access to constitutionally protected materials.” Age verification is a “content-based” restriction.

Laws prohibiting access to books because of the content are virtually similar to laws prohibiting access to certain websites due to that content. Any argument to suggest otherwise is moot.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

Filed Under: book bans, kevin roberts, porn, porn ban, project 2025, russell vought

School President Throws Library Dean Under The Bus After Florida College’s LGBTQ-Books-In-A-Dumpster Dumpster Fire

from the both-a-coward-and-a-liar dept

The fallout came fast and hard for New College of Florida and its administrators after multiple videos were posted of books dealing mainly with sexual identity and race found filling a dumpster behind the school library.

The immediate reaction from the school’s spokesperson, Nathan Marks, was nonsensical. Marks claimed two things, neither of them believable. The first was that this was just routine periodical “pruning” of books that were too damaged or otherwise unneeded by the school. The second was that it was illegal to notify students, staff, or other entities that this purge was happening so that they might be able to rescue some of the books slated for destruction.

As to the first part of his claim, it was immediately apparent most books were neither damaged or old. Instead, they were books retained by the school’s now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center — something that was axed as soon as Governor DeSantis stocked the school board with his personal picks.

The second part was blatantly false. The school was permitted by law to sell or give away the books to anyone interested in them. In this case, it simply chose not to because the far right school board saw the books as garbage and treated them as such.

Now, the flailing is even worse. A steady stream of criticism has forced the college to react. And it has reacted in the worst way possible. The worst way is personified by school president Richard Corcoran, who has decided to pin all of the blame on someone who likely had no control over the purge pushed by the school board.

A New College of Florida library administrator has been placed on leave after thousands of books were found in a dumpster on campus, a university spokesperson confirmed to News Channel 8.

Shannon Hausinger, dean of the library, was placed on leave after “the library did not follow all of the state administrative requirements while conducting the routine disposition of materials,” the spokesperson said.

Maybe Hausinger agreed with the purge. Maybe she didn’t. Either way, Corcoran has made her the scapegoat.

But that’s not all he did. He claimed the public was too stupid to recognize what happened here. As is almost always the case when public leaders get caught doing things they shouldn’t, Corcoran has chosen to blame the media and anyone else who might have disagreed with this move.

“Unfortunately, much of the coverage has been sensationalized, catering to the narratives of our critics,” Corcoran wrote in the letter. “While the optics of seeing thousands of books in a dumpster are far from ideal, it is important to understand the disposition of materials is a necessary process in libraries, and ensures that our collection remains relevant, up-to-date, and in good condition for our community’s use.”

To put this politely, that’s bullshit. The school board — the same one that shut down the Gender and Diversity Center — had a hand in this. We know this because at least one board member has admitted as much. Christopher Rufo — a board member personally appointed by Ron DeSantis — took to ExTwitter to crow about this purge of LGBTQ content, saying the quiet part as loudly as he could.

If you can’t see/read the screenshot, it features several shots of these books in the dumpster, accompanied by Rufo’s statement:

We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash.

And here’s what Rufo said after taking the college board position:

Earlier this year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appointed a new board majority, including me, to New College of Florida and tasked us with a simple, but audacious, mission: take over the failing school, bring in new leadership, and transform the institution into a liberal arts college in the classical tradition.

The move caused a firestorm. Conservatives cheered it on as an essential step in recapturing democratic institutions. Progressives denounced it as a violation of some principle or another. But, whatever your opinion, one thing is certain: the takeover of New College has changed the dynamics of America’s culture war and, if successful, will provide a model for conservatives across the nation.

None of this is addressed in the school president’s letter to the college’s staff. This unfortunate truth is simply ignored and spun to make it appear as though it’s just a misunderstanding that has been inflamed by careless reporting.

But that was never the case. This was always about a conservative-majority board inflicting its preferences on the college, starting with the gender studies program and culminating in the shocking display of contempt that is hundreds of gender and race-related books being consigned to a dumpster and hauled away before any collective effort could be made to rescue literary works DeSantis’ hand-picked board considers trash.

Filed Under: book bans, censorship, chris rufo, free speech, new college of florida, richard corcoran, ron desantis, shannon hausinger, stop woke act

Florida College Throws Out A Bunch Of LGBTQ+ Books Just Because

from the licking-Ron-DeSantis'-elfin-boots dept

No doubt encouraged by the governor and state legislature’s hatred of anything not aligned with their hetero-first principles, a Florida college not only shuttered its Gender and Diversity Center, but threw out hundreds of books dealing with, you know, gender and/or diversity.

The Stop WOKE Act is likely to blame here, even if it’s not explicitly referenced by any of the college reps quoted in Steven Walker’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune article. The part of the law that tells private companies what they can and can’t discuss with their employees is completely dead, but the part covering publicly-funded schools is only mostly dead. And the state will continue blowing money defending the unconstitutional law because (1) it’s other people’s money, and (2) it really, really wants any small piece of this law to survive because legislators really, really want to keep making LGBTQ+ feel miserable and unwelcome in the Sunshine State.

The Gender and Diversity Center was shut down shortly after the school board obtained a conservative majority. The hundreds of books owned by the center were considered so valueless they were tossed en masse into the nearest dumpster.

A dumpster in the parking lot of Jane Bancroft Cook Library on the campus of New College overflowed with books and collections from the now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center on Tuesday afternoon. Video captured in the afternoon showed a vehicle driving away with the books before students were notified. In the past, students were given an opportunity to purchase books that were leaving the college’s library collection.

As always, the cruelty is the point. At any point prior to their removal, students, teachers, and other interested parties could have been told these books were going to be removed. But rather than do that, the books were thrown away as quickly and unceremoniously as possible. Some were rescued, but the footage embedded in the Herald-Tribune shows most of the books were hauled off to the nearest dump.

When contacted by the paper, college reps pretended this was just a routine “weeding” of the school library’s shelves. Even if this were true (and it clearly isn’t), the college could have informed students, teachers, and others so these books could find new homes and readers. But the college didn’t want anyone to have any access to content its board no longer considers worth reading.

College spokesperson Nathan March also claimed it was against the law to give away or sell the books to students or other interested parties. Reporter Steven Walker points out the falseness of this claim:

March referenced Florida Statute 273 as the reason books could not be donated or sold. However, FS 273 states that New College could dispose of state-funded personal property by “selling or transferring the property to any other governmental entity … private nonprofit agency … (and) through a sale open to the public.”

That makes it clear it was handled the way the majority of the board wanted it handled: a “weeding” that was anything but routine — one that mainly targeted gender and race-related books, all without giving anyone any notice this purge of unwanted content was going to be happening. It could have been handled in a way that didn’t give the appearance of a bunch of censorial asshats sitting around wishing they could have burnt them instead. But the school and its conservative board wanted to make it clear they thought these works literature were literally nothing more than trash.

Filed Under: book bans, florida, free speech, library, new college of florida, stop woke act

8th Circuit Says Iowa Can Keep Its LGBTQ-Targeting Book Ban

from the reviving-irrational-hate dept

In one of several ongoing campaigns of hate in our country, the Iowa legislature passed a law that not only changed what schools could teach, but what students could be allowed to read.

First, let’s get to the changes to the state’s health curriculum, which is nothing less than the erasure of HIV/AIDS sufferers.

The health curriculum shall include the characteristics of communicable diseases including acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

[…]

The health curriculum shall include age-appropriate and research-based information regarding the characteristics of sexually transmitted diseases, including HPV and the availability of a vaccine to prevent HPV, and acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

That’s what’s being deleted from school health curriculum — a state-enforced vanishing of information about a communicable disease that has contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths across the nation and tens of millions around the world. The state legislature believes students should have to seek out information about this disease on their own, outside of school rooms, and of their own initiative.

This is nothing more than the government expressing a disdain for anyone non-heterosexual. The state pretends this is about giving parents more control over what their children are taught, but the law only allows the state to decide what children are taught. There’s nothing in the law that allows parents to decide they want their children to be taught about HIV/AIDS. There’s only the removal of that particular part of the curriculum.

The other part of the law governs the content of books carried by school libraries. It’s more of the same, with the law targeting “depictions of sex acts” in books. Of course, the law contains an exception for “religious texts,” which (also of course) only means the Bible and its depictions of incest, rape, and sodomy.

The law was immediately challenged by pretty much every rights group and book publisher late last year. One lawsuit was spearheaded by the ACLU and a ton of parents and students rights groups. The second lawsuit was headed up by book publisher Penguin, along with a long list of authors and other, smaller publishers. That lawsuit also notably featured a powerhouse in the educational arena: the Iowa State Education Association, the union representing most of the state’s educators.

Less than a month later, these lawsuits managed to secure an injunction forbidding the law from being enforced. The federal court handling the lawsuits saw nothing remotely redeemable about the new law and made its point forcefully in its decision:

The law is incredibly broad and has resulted in the removal of hundreds of books from school libraries, including, among others, nonfiction history books, classic works of fiction, Pulitzer Prize winning contemporary novels, books that regularly appear on Advanced Placement exams, and even books designed to help students avoid being victimized by sexual assault. The sweeping restrictions in Senate File 496 are unlikely to satisfy the First Amendment under any standard of scrutiny and thus may not be enforced while the case is pending. Indeed, the Court has been unable to locate a single case upholding the constitutionality of a school library restriction even remotely similar to Senate File 496.

As if that wasn’t enough already, the federal court added this while discussing the restrictions on in-class instruction:

The law forbids programs, promotion, and instruction to students in those grades relating to “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” but those terms are defined a neutral way that makes no distinction between cisgender or transgender identity or gay or straight relationships. Meaning: on its face, the law forbids any programs, promotion, or instruction recognizing that anyone is male or female or in a relationship of any sort (gay or straight). The statute is therefore content-neutral but so wildly overbroad that every school district and elementary school teacher in the State has likely been violating it since the day the school year started. This renders the statute void for vagueness under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the State will have unfettered discretion to decide when to enforce it and against whom, thus making it all but impossible for a reasonable person to know what will and will not lead to punishment.

That (mostly) killed off the new law. The only part that remained was the part of the law that required administrators to notify parents if their students requested “accommodations relating to gender identity,” including the use of preferred pronouns. And the only reason that part of the law survived was that no plaintiff could plausibly claim to be harmed (potentially or otherwise) by this particular mandate.

You’d think that decision would have stood. It was clear and forceful, and detailed everywhere the law violated Constitutional rights. But the Eight Circuit Appeals Court says otherwise. Its decision [PDF] is extremely short and barely interacts with the lower court’s decision, other than to say its initial reading of the law was incorrect.

It does agree some of the plaintiffs can still pursue their First Amendment claims (albeit not exactly in the way they’ve pursued them here) because curation of school library content by librarians and schools cannot truly be considered “government speech” — something that does not implicate the First Amendment.

[I]t is doubtful that the public would view the placement and removal of books in public school libraries as the government speaking. Take routine examples of historic tomes on political science. A well-appointed school library could include copies of Plato’s The Republic, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels’ Das Kapital, Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. As Plaintiffs noted, if placing these books on the shelf of public school libraries constitutes government speech, the State “is babbling prodigiously and incoherently.”

But granting that part of the argument to the plaintiffs (and only some of the plaintiffs) isn’t enough to keep the injunction intact. It says the lower court applied the wrong standard, replacing what the plaintiffs were actually engaging in (a facial challenge to the law) with something a bit more subjective.

We note that the district court concluded that the Library Provision is a viewpoint-neutral, content-based, age-appropriate restriction on the content of public school libraries, and we agree. The purpose of public school libraries is to advance the school curriculum—that is, to facilitate the pedagogical mission of the school, which may involve some limitation of expression.

[…]

Given the pedagogical mission and the policy making authority possessed by Iowa, it is important in conducting a review and analysis to bear in mind that Iowa is not required to tolerate speech that undermines or is inconsistent with its central mission of educating Iowa children.

Meanwhile, the district court insisted the Instruction Section could only be interpreted in an “absurd” manner, an interpretation not shared by the defendants and even some of the Plaintiffs. The district court imparted its interpretation without referencing several canons of construction that may have revealed a narrower, reasonable interpretation, such as the canons of constitutional-avoidance, noscitur a sociis, and Iowa’s admonition to interpret its laws reasonably and in a manner feasible of execution, Iowa Code § 4.4(3)-(4). Other interpretive methods should be discussed and exhausted before concluding the only textual interpretation is an absurd one because the resulting interpretation inevitably bears on whether the law’s applications are constitutional or not.

This means the state can go back to banning books from school libraries while the First Amendment challenges are more fully-developed in the lower court. But no facial challenges to the law survive. Anything that has a chance of moving forward will have to use the “as applied” standard, which means book bans can be challenged on a case-by-case basis, and litigants will have to do some dividing before they can conquer. And they’ll have to decide whether any single challenge is worth pursuing since it seems clear the Appeals Court won’t be handing out injunctions for anything broader than the injury particular to each individual plaintiff.

And that sucks. It means a lot more time and money will need to be spent to protect Iowans from their own government. All the state has to do is continue to tell students they can’t read this or they can’t learn about that.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 8th circuit appeals court, book bans, censorship, iowa, lawsuit, libraries

Instead Of Banning Books, Idaho Library Decides To Ban Kids In Response To New Law On ‘Inappropriate Books’

from the no-books-for-you dept

Public libraries are supposed to be places for communities to gather and learn, with an important focus on being a place for kids to gain access to information. But thanks to a moral panic in the GOP about “indoctrination” in libraries, it seems that at least one library has decided to shut its door to children.

A public library in a tiny Idaho mountain community announced on Facebook that it is no longer allowing minors to enter its facilities and check out books, citing a new law adopted by the state legislature. Donnelly Public Library, in the roughly 250-person town of Donnelly, Idaho, will still offer after-school and summer learning programs for local youth.

But it’s now an adults-only establishment—literally.

“Donnelly Public Library was deeply saddened by the passing of [House Bill] 710,” the library posted. “Unfortunately, the ambiguous language in the legislation leaves us no options but to make some very drastic changes. In order to comply with the legislation we will be transitioning our Library to be an adult only library as of July 1.”

House Bill (HB) 710 allows parents or guardians to sue any school or public library for carrying materials that could be viewed as age-inappropriate and obscene. Libraries have to move books and materials or face lawsuits. Donnelly Public Library is a small facility in a literal log cabin.

“Donnelly [Public] Library is only 1024 [square foot],” said the library. “Our size prohibits us from separating our ‘grown up’ books to be out of the accessible range of children.”

Idaho’s Republican-controlled state legislature adopted HB 710, and Gov. Brad Little signed it into law in April. The law’s proponents argue it is meant to give parents more oversight of what their children are reading while doubly serving as a law to protect minors from viewing potentially disturbing images. Entering force on July 1, 2024, HB 710 features a definition of obscene materials for minors that critics believe to be broad and, per the library, “ambiguous.”

“‘Sexual conduct’ means any act of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse, or physical contact with a person’s clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks or, if such person be a female, the breast,” reads a portion of the bill. The law provides for broad assumptions regarding material that is potentially “obscene” or “harmful to minors” for simply dealing with the subject matter of sexuality or the human body’s biological reproductive functions. Parents or guardians can arbitrarily apply these definitions against libraries accused of “promoting” material that is supposedly harmful to minors. In the law, “promoting” refers to virtually any act of selling, loaning out, and distributing books, DVDs, CDs, or other media types. The law also prohibits live performances that meet the definition of being harmful to minors. It is pretty encompassing.

What’s even more nuts is that HB 710 is a bounty law. A “bounty law” allows private parties to bring civil complaints against entities for alleged violations of the law. If a judge determines the law is broken, the private parties are entitled to predetermined sums as compensation. HB 710 creates a civil right of action to sue schools and public libraries for promoting obscene materials to minors. If the parties suing the institutions prevail, they’re given $250 in statutory damages.

They could be entitled to compensation for the actual, alleged damages of having their child exposed to a book viewed as violating HB 710. For small library systems like Donnelly Public Library, litigation prospects could be financially catastrophic and spatially restrictive. The law also allows county prosecutors and the Idaho state attorney general to bring civil action against schools and public libraries. Due to this, it isn’t that surprising that this public library is now adults-only. Nothing will be accomplished. Here’s why. HB 710 is grossly unconstitutional.

Proponents will argue the law doesn’t ban books or the ability for adults to access materials.

Instead, they’ll say it gives parents more say in what children can read. That sounds all well and good, but a claim of such a law empowering parental rights is naïve. State lawmakers have essentially deputized pissed-off voters who believe in conspiracy theories about the nation’s youth being indoctrinated in public schools and libraries by leftist educators and librarians.

Individuals ultimately become state actors incentivized by promises of guaranteed monies to challenge books and their locations that probably aren’t even “pornographic” or “obscene.”

Anything that even remotely deals with sexuality or gender in any capacity could be challenged. Such challenges would violate the First Amendment rights of authors, parents, and children — but, most importantly, librarians, educators, and administrators. I can’t say this would happen exactly in the case of the Donnelly Public Library.

However, the fact that this library is so concerned with the beefed up liabilities under HB 710 that the library district board had to restrict the age of access for its patrons speaks to how unjust laws that significantly restrict and regulate libraries can genuinely be. There is no regard for the unintended consequences, which could have a greater impact on the state than the intent of the law.

A rich body of research shows that a child’s ability to access a school or public library positively impacts their development.

In some studies, the role of the librarian in rural communities carries as much weight as a teacher or other trusted adult.

While it is true that Donnelly Public School isn’t canceling its after-school and summer reading programs, restricting year-round access to this library to just adults could come at a cost. I believe that having the ability to read is a fundamental human right, especially for teens. I might not be the best voice to discuss the rights of youth, but it’s evident this is a product of fear-mongering to gain power among Republicans is out of political gain.

It is the Republicans, in the case of HB 710, that are harming the children just so a powerful minority of individuals could appease their political backers. No matter who it is or how they are held, everyone should be able to access the information they want and need.

Michael McGrady covers the legal and tech side of the online porn business, among other topics.

Filed Under: book bans, book burning, bounty laws, donnelly, donnelly public library, free speech, hb 710, idaho, inappropriate books

DeSantis Signs Law Limiting Book Challenges After The Shitty People He Encouraged To Be Shitty Proved To Be Even Shittier Than He Thought They’d Be

from the well-well-well-if-it-isn't-the-consequences-of-my-own-actions dept

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and Florida’s legislature have combined forces to craft and pass some of the most unconstitutional laws ever written in the United States. A series of bad laws has led to series of injunctions from federal courts, including one that traveled all the way to the Supreme Court just to have the First Amendment reaffirmed by the top court in the land.

It’s a campaign of hate. The laws, without exception, target either people the governor and his legislative fanbois don’t like (a lot of this targets LGBTQ+ people) or people who don’t like DeSantis or his legislative fanbois (hence all the legislation targeting social media services which don’t find it all that profitable to host hateful content).

Like other states with the same set of bad ideas and worse legislators, Florida has turned libraries into battlefields where the First Amendment matters less than the petty outrage of people who can’t stand to have any ideas they don’t agree with given shelf space. Book challenges are the new normal in far too many places in the United States.

But Florida leads the way by a large margin. According to stats gathered by PEN America, Florida has served up more than three-quarters of the nation’s book bans over the last six months of 2023.

The vast majority of school book bans occurred in Florida, with 3,135 bans across 11 of the state’s school districts. A spokesperson with Florida’s Department of Education declined NPR’s request for comment.

Across the nation, 4,349 book bans were reported over that same period. And that six month period produced more book bans than the entirety of 2022.

Apparently, that’s beginning to be a bit of a problem for the state that leads the nation in book challenges. Realizing that most challenges are filed by just a handful of extremely petty people with far too much time and ideology on their hands (the NPR report notes a single Wisconsin parent was responsible for 444 book challenges), DeSantis is now trying to unreap at least part of the harvest he has sown.

Florida residents who don’t have children attending school will have significantly fewer chances to challenge books in local K-12 libraries under a new law signed Tuesday by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Meant to curb what lawmakers described as a “logistical nightmare” facing school districts flooded with requests to remove books, the policy marks an admission from Republican leaders that last year’s expansions to book challenge laws may have gone too far after national backlash from free speech groups and even some conservatives.

We’ll see if this actually deters the book ban overachievers from filing challenges as quickly as they can change the To: field in their form letters. Somehow, I think this will just encourage a lot of “straw” challenges from people who either don’t exist or don’t realize some shitty sociopath is using their name to engage in ideological warfare with ideas and content they don’t like.

This would all be stupid enough if it weren’t for the statements made by DeSantis when signing this bill into law.

All of it is disingenuous. First, DeSantis pretends it isn’t just the shittiest members of his voter base that are responsible for having to legislate a claw-back on book challenges.

In backing the idea, DeSantis said Florida wants to stamp out frivolous challenges as “activists” from “all ends of the political spectrum” are objecting to “everything under the sun.”

It’s the Trumpian “fine people on both sides” tactic but in reverse. And it’s bullshit. Let’s go back and check the data gathered by PEN:

Those who ban books often cite “obscenity law and hyperbolic rhetoric about ‘porn in schools’ to justify banning books about sexual violence and LGBTQ+ topics (and in particular, trans identities),” the report says.

That doesn’t sound like “all ends of the political spectrum.” That sounds like one very narrow end of the political spectrum — the end containing the narrowest minds.

Then there’s this bit of chastisement, which should have provoked open laughter from every journalist in attendance:

“Schools are there to serve the community,” DeSantis said Monday during an event touting the legislation. “Schools are not there for you to try to go on some ideological joyride at the expense of our kids.”

Holy fuck, Ron! Your entire state is little more than an ideological joyride, at least since you’ve taken office. Your legislature — with few exceptions — does nothing more than craft more rides for your ideological playground. You and your buddies in the legislature directly encouraged this sort of bullshit from your constituents. And now you want to pretend you’re somehow above it all?!

You created this shitstorm, Ron. I guess we can all feel thankful you at least feel bad enough about it to show up with a tarp, even though pretty much everything is already covered in feces. But you should be fine moving forward. I would assume the legislators on your side of the aisle that approved this bill have used up whatever last vestiges of shame they contained. This isn’t a sign of hope. It’s just the last plateau before everything resumes its usual downhill course.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, book bans, florida, ron desantis

No Love For The Haters: Illinois Bans Book Bans (But Not Really)

from the trading-compelled-speech-for-prior-restraint? dept

Across the nation, bigoted politicians (of the Republican variety, almost exclusively) are trying to punish and silence content and expression they don’t like.

It’s not like it’s even a close question about who’s doing this and why. A slew of bills targeting drag shows and LGBTQ+ writing have been tossed into legislatures all over the nation. Some of those have become law. Most of those that have become law have been challenged in court — challenges often followed swiftly by injunctions prohibiting their enforcement.

But that hasn’t stopped a very motivated, very ignorant subset of politicians from continuing to push laws that threaten civil liberties. And — win or lose — it hasn’t stopped a very determined, extremely minute subset of individuals from trying to make the United States a worse place to live for anyone who isn’t straight and white.

The Washington Post has published a series of articles on book bans and book challenges based on public records it has obtained. What politicians love to portray as a groundswell movement representing a majority of the nation are actually just the psychotic actions of extremely shitty people with far too much time on their hands.

According to an analysis by the Post, 60% of book challenges made in the 2021-2022 school year came from the same 11 adults. […] The majority of objections were on books authored by or about LGBTQ+ people or people of color.

None of these people are worried whether or not children might have access to books like, say, Mein Kampf or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or even the super-sexed up compositions of a dozens of romance novelists. Nope, the publications these 11 people (and the politicians who cater to them) are concerned with deal with certain topics these people would rather children had no knowledge of.

Nearly half of the challenges in The Post’s database, 43 percent, targeted titles with LGBTQ characters or themes.

[…]

Thirty-six percent of targeted books featured characters of color or dealt with issues of race and racism. Of the top 10 most challenged books in The Post’s database, five fell into this category: George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Jonathan Evison’s “Lawn Boy,” Ashley Hope Pérez’s “Out of Darkness” and Angie Thomas’s “The Hate U Give.”

The good news is that none of this shit is going to fly in Illinois. A bill [PDF] signed by Governor JB Pritzer last year took effect January 1st. It’s a ban on book bans, and it means the tactics deployed by the 11 people noted above (along with groups like Moms for Liberty) won’t be nearly as effective in Illinois as they have been elsewhere.

The new law contains a statement of intent from state legislators:

It is further declared to be the policy of the State to encourage and protect the freedom of libraries and library systems to acquire materials without external limitation and to be protected against attempts to ban, remove, or otherwise restrict access to books or other materials.

It sounds pretty good until you look at the text of the law, which leaves it up to publicly-funded libraries to fight back against censorship with no guarantee the state of Illinois will always have its back. The law ties state funding to ban resistance at the library level — something that can easily be overridden by future laws that might, say, tie funding to complying with state or local-level book bans.

In order to be eligible for State grants, a library or library system shall adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights that indicates materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval or, in the alternative, develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials within the library or library system.

Cool, I guess. If the legislative intent is just “Hey, don’t ban books or we’ll take your money,” mission accomplished. Sure, this might make it easier for libraries to reject book challenges by pointing challengers to the law that ties funding to open access to content. On the other hand, adopting a private party’s “bill of rights” isn’t going to protect the state’s libraries from being forced to cooperate with book bans handed down by state or local politicians.

To actually protect libraries against current and future enemies, the state needs to codify this prohibition of book bans at the state level. And it should do this. There’s no reason it shouldn’t. Protecting libraries from future book bans isn’t going to turn libraries into vast repositories of pornography. All it’s going to do is protect libraries (and their users) from content bans the next time the prevailing political winds shift.

Sure, this makes it slightly more difficult for state pols to enact book bans that target public libraries by tying their funding to these stipulations. But those most likely to push statewide book bans don’t really care whether or not people have free access to published works. All that matters to them is that certain works dealing with certain subject matter written by certain people won’t be available to anyone who doesn’t have cash on hand to purchase these works.

Nice try, Illinois. But try harder. This is barely better than nothing at all.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, book bans, free speech, illinois, jb pritzker, libraries

State Of Iowa Sued By Pretty Much Everyone After Codifying Hatred With A LGBTQ-Targeting Book Ban

from the well-fuck-the-Constitution-I-guess dept

I continue to be sickened and saddened that this country — considered the Land of the Free — continues to devolve (rapidly!) into a place where intolerance and bigotry are being written into law. And all it took was a four-year calamity headed up by one of the worst presidents in history, Donald Trump.

His acolytes have decided the best way to please the basest members of their voter base (as well as curry favor with Trump) is to convert their hatred into law in order to punish the people they like the least, which is apparently anyone who isn’t heterosexual.

I’ve expressed my displeasure at length more than once. And, as much as I’d like to do it again, I won’t. It’s not going to win over the bigots. And it’s not going to add more clarity to the issues. Those who can see what’s going on clearly understand. Those who want to pretend this is what America should be clearly prefer the heavy hand of the Taliban, even while viewing anyone adhering to the Islamic faith as inherently suspicious.

This is only one of the latest attacks on certain members of the American public. There are similar efforts in progress or enacted elsewhere in the country. Iowa’s governor, Kim Reynolds, signed Senate File 496 into law in May. According to the bill’s preamble, it’s a law that’s supposed to give parents more control over what their kids are exposed to, either via public libraries or classroom instruction. But the law makes it crystal clear it is only meant to harm certain people.

Before we even get to the book bans and speech restrictions foisted on teachers, we can catch a whiff of the intolerance the law propels by what it removes from the law it’s amending.

The health curriculum shall include the characteristics of communicable diseases including acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Not exactly subtle. Students will still be taught about communicable diseases, but conspicuously they will no longer receive information about a communicable disease that has killed more than 40 million people worldwide and currently affects roughly the same number of people. Why is this disease no longer suitable subject matter? Well, one has to assume it’s because it’s one that has affected homosexual men most frequently.

That’s in the first few paragraphs of the law: a deliberate attempt to wish one particular disease into the collective cornfield maintained by hateful, powerful people in the Iowa government.

It manages to get worse from there. The law won’t even allow educators to talk about how to prevent or manage this disease.

The health curriculum shall include age-appropriate and research-based information regarding the characteristics of sexually transmitted diseases, including HPV and the availability of a vaccine to prevent HPV, and acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Truly disgusting. Life-saving information will be withheld from Iowa students because their government simply does not like non-heterosexuals.

There’s more. There are also a few new First Amendment violations, as Courthouse News reports in its coverage of the first constitutional challenge filed against the state:

Among other things, the new law requires public school districts to ban books and materials containing descriptions or depictions of “sex acts” from all Iowa school libraries except for certain religious texts, such as the Bible, and forbids mention of sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through the sixth grade, in or outside of the classroom. And, the law requires teachers, counselors, and other school staff to report to parents if a student asks to be referred to by names or pronouns that align with their gender identity.

Yes, these are all things that should be sued over. And they are all things that legislators — if they weren’t so blinded by their own bigotry and desire to ingratiate themselves to the bigots in their voting bloc — would have realized weren’t actually things the government is permitted to do.

And that has already resulted in plenty of action from entities that should never have been forced to do this sort of thing in the first place.

Although the law has already gone into effect, some penalty provisions that subject school administrators and staff to disciplinary action do not kick in until Jan. 1. Still, school districts are scrambling to figure out how to comply. The Des Moines suburb of Urbandale initially identified 374 books for removal before that was pared down to 64. Mason City in northern Iowa used the AI tool ChatGPT to identify targeted books and pulled 19 books from school shelves.

The first lawsuit [PDF] arrived on November 28, featuring a long list of plaintiffs represented by the ACLU:

GLBT YOUTH IN IOWA SCHOOLS TASK FORCE d/b/a/ IOWA SAFE SCHOOLS; P.B.-P., by his parent andnext friend, BELINDA SCARROTT; P.C. and A.C., by their parents and next friends, RICHARD and ULRIKE CARLSON; T.S., by her parent and next friend, ERIC SAYLOR; B.F.S., by their parents and next friends, BRIGIT and JOSEPH STEVENS; ROBERT SMITH, by his parents and next friends, JANE and JOHN SMITH; B.F., by their parent and next friend, LARA NEWSOM; JAMES DOE, by his parent and next friend, JOHN DOE

It’s also a depressing list. Most of the plaintiffs are minors — ones expecting to be negatively affected by the new law, a new law that refuses to treat them as people worthy or rights, much less respect. They have to sue because failing to act means continuing their education in a system that now features codified intolerance.

From the lawsuit:

On its face, in its intent and purpose, and as applied, SF 496 forces educators to silence their LGBTQ+ students and deny them access to books, information, and ideas about sexual orientation and gender identity. SF 496’s vague and overbroad language invites arbitrary and discriminatory restrictions on the rights of Plaintiffs and other LGBTQ+ students, stigmatizing them, preventing them from associating with one another for purposes of mutual support, education, and advocacy, and depriving them of the comfort of knowing that other LGBTQ+ people exist and are happy and healthy members of our community.

Certainly, the state and its lawyers will disagree that this is the intent and purpose of the law. But it’s right there in the law, starting with its deliberate excision of a single transmittable disease from school health curriculum. Everything else follows from that.

In addition to the erasure of AIDS, LGBTQ content, and any recognition of human sexual identity that differs from the on/off delusion of two sexes these legislators cling to, the law is already removing literature from libraries that has long been considered essential reading.

Some school districts even have banned books considered part of the canon for students taking the AP Literature and Composition Exam, including As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Classics commonly taught in curricula across the country—such as Grendel by John Gardner, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and Animal Farm by George Orwell—also appear on the banned book lists of multiple districts, compromising students’ education. Novels that were taught almost universally to previous generations of Iowans already have been struck from shelves across the _state_…

That’s only a very small part of this 96-page lawsuit. The First Amendment implications are clear. This law never should have been passed.

If the state doesn’t care about the health and happiness of a few students and/or their legal representatives from the ACLU, it might be forced to pretend to care now that some plaintiffs with considerable weight have entered the arena. Two days after the ACLU suit, major book publishers filed one of their own.

Penguin Random House, along with four authors whose work it publishes, a parent, teachers and school librarians, sued the state in federal court in Des Moines Thursday arguing the statute, Senate File 496, enacted in 2023, violates the plaintiffs’ First and 14th Amendment rights. The complaint names as defendants state education officials and two Iowa school districts.

The list of plaintiffs in this lawsuit [PDF] leads off with the big one: Penguin Random House. Following that is a short list of authors and then another big one, the Iowa State Education Association — the union representing the educators who are being told they can’t talk about certain things and they can’t provide access to certain content.

As the lawsuit explains to the deliberately obtuse legislators who passed the bill and the governor who enacted the law, the First Amendment simply doesn’t allow this.

The right to speak and the right to read are inextricably intertwined. Just as authors have the right to communicate their ideas to students without undue interference from the government, students have a corresponding right to receive those ideas. Publishers and educators connect authors to students. If the government dislikes an author’s idea, it can offer a competing message. It cannot shut down the marketplace of ideas.

The law is so badly and broadly written it cannot hope to survive this challenge. And, as this lawsuit notes, it’s not just the First Amendment at play here.

First, under the pretext of protecting students from “pornography,” Senate File 496 prohibits books in school libraries and classroom collections that contain a description or visual depiction of a “sex act.” This restriction applies to all grades, kindergarten through twelfth grade, without consideration of the book as a whole, only excepting religious books. By so broadly regulating the display and availability of books that are constitutionally protected as to at least a significant number of students, this standard violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments because it is an impermissible content-based restriction, restricts access to constitutionally protected books, and is unconstitutionally vague.

Second, a portion of Senate File 496 also appears, and is being interpreted by Iowa school districts, to prohibit books in school libraries and classroom collections that “relate” to “gender identity” or “sexual orientation.” This sweeping prohibition defines gender identity and sexual orientation so broadly that the prohibition could apply to all gender identities and any depiction of a romantic relationship. This prohibition violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments because it is an impermissible content-based restriction and is unconstitutionally vague. In practice this prohibition appears to have been intended to apply, and has been applied, to remove only books containing LGBTQ+ themes or characters or those written by authors within the LGBTQ+ community. Therefore, this prohibition also violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments because it discriminates against LGBTQ+ viewpoints and authors.

This law won’t escape judicial review intact. But the bigotry that propels this sort of legislation will live on. This failure to silence certain people will be treated as blow against heterosexuality and mainstream Christianity by its proponents. They will claim — despite all evidence to the contrary — that they’re the victims here. That they’re the ones being subjected to malicious abuses of power. We can only hope fewer and fewer people will align themselves with these hateful idiots. Governments that do this sort of thing are playing with house money. The only thing that will truly deter them is showing them the door during the next election.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, aids, book bans, free speech, iowa, libraries, speech suppression

A Gentle Reminder That Censoring Books Is Never A ‘Reasonable’ Solution

from the this-is-real-life dept

Conservatives are making the rounds again, placing op-eds and analytical pieces explaining how book bans aren’t really book bans. For example, Education Week published a column by a pair of authors from the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation trying to justify laws across the country that restrict and even remove certain texts from many public school libraries.

The authors, Max Eden and Jay Greene, wrote in their column that there is an overblown assumption that restricting particular texts for certain age groups is not banning. It is simply parental rights. Both go on to argue that these restrictions aren’t, well, restrictions at all. The term “book ban” is also utilized by critics of these policies for “partisan purpose.” They add that there is a considerable degree of these so-called restrictions being “reasonable.”

There is nothing reasonable about censorship, and you would have to be extremely misinformed if you assume that third graders are being required to read books the caliber of Fifty Shades of Gray.

At issue, in part, is LGBTQ+ subject material in books available to young adults. Greene is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He espouses the organization’s worldview that material, such as the prize-winning young adult graphic novel Gender Queer: A Memoir by illustrator Maia Kobabe, is somehow “pornographic” in nature and should ultimately be banned.

Greene has recently written that people shouldn’t be concerned over book bans because it is a manufactured hysteria propagated by the news media. Whether that’s true or not, he’s justifying an act that would make some conservatives a few decades ago squirm: censoring authors at the public schools in their communities. The media may have overblown some of this, but in no way has the narrative of conservatives banning books arisen from political elites controlling the news. It’s actually happening.

There is more than ample evidence to suggest that right-wingers, mainly social conservatives who have bought into the ‘gender ideology’ social contagion bullshit, are actively restricting and even prohibiting, in some cases, titles that deal with subject matter like sexuality, LGBTQ+, and related topics. Eden and Greene lose further credibility in their argument when their employers are actively supporting or tolerating the troubling screeds of conservative thought leaders laid out in a recent treatise on policy, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. I wrote about the Mandate for Leadership in August. Published by the right-wing astroturf outfit Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation is responsible for the book that openly calls for the First Amendment rights of those who propagate what they view as “porn” to be suspended and imprisoned. To wit, my dears:

“Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today:…children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”

“Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

Yeah, that’s totally reasonable. Greene works for the man who wrote this, Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts. Greene’s writing in Education Week is particularly telling as it is a means to verify that this is the real intention of the post-Trump conservative movement.

This type of advocacy is also antithetical to the spirit of the First Amendment. Censorship can be called many different things. Censorship is a method used by the politically powerful to impose incompatible views of a few on everyone else.

Censorship isn’t the solution. More education on these topics, including efforts to destigmatize certain groups and beliefs, is necessary.

Michael McGrady covers the tech side of the porn business, among other things.

Filed Under: book bans, censorship, libraries, schools
Companies: heritage foundation

American Library Association Data Shows The Party Of Free Speech Is Doing More Than Ever To Silence Speech

from the party-of-hatred-is-more-accurate-imo dept

We’re increasingly at the mercy of bigots in this country. That’s an upsetting turn of events, considering our history, which includes a long list of enshrined rights as well as the assertion that all people are created equal.

Thanks to the aberration that was the Donald Trump presidency, the worst people in the nation suddenly felt heard. They engaged more freely in hate speech, COVID disinformation, and activities ranging from election interference to straight-up insurrection.

These people proclaimed themselves to be members of the party of free speech. Any social media service reluctant to host hateful speech (which is hardly any service these days), dangerous assertions about an ongoing pandemic, and calls to violently overturn election results was branded a “censor.” These US residents wore each suspension or ban as a badge of honor — a supposed indication of their unbending willingness to tell the “truth.” Self-delusion was presented as fearlessness in the face of (not actually even) censorship.

That bigotry and hatred has spilled over to the public sphere, where actual constitutional violations actually occur. An alarming amount of Americans are now seeking to silence voices they don’t like. Most recently, the voices they don’t like emanate from people who don’t identify as heterosexual.

The opposition to voices representing people whose sexuality doesn’t align with close-minded assumptions about binary sexual identity has escalated since Trump took office and secured the loyalty of similarly small-minded legislators and supporters all over the nation.

It would be nice if the efforts we see mounted day after day by bigots could just be considered ironic. Instead, they’re a very dangerous form of hypocrisy. The same people who brandish weapons while shouting “THE SECOND AMENDMENT PROTECTS THE FIRST” tend to be the same people willing to tread all over the First Amendment rights of people they don’t like, don’t understand, or otherwise don’t agree with.

Fortunately, they’re not getting much help from courts. Even Trump appointees have been unwilling to sign off on First Amendment violations proposed by legislators who think they’re allowed to silence people they’re unwilling to treat as fellow human beings.

The people who support bigoted legislators have become far more active in recent years. Whatever remnants of shame or better judgment have been shed in favor of turning the United States into an anti-LGBTQ nation more aligned with Saudi Arabia, Russia, or any number of nations run by hateful autocrats.

The low-hanging fruit are our nation’s libraries, entities that have been traditionally given considerable First Amendment latitude. These great equalizers of information access are being subjected to constant harassment by spiteful dipshits powered by irrational hate and a complete disrespect for the tenets of the First Amendment.

Here’s how it’s going in the United States right now — you know, the nation regarded as the leader of free world.

There were nearly 700 attempts to ban library books in the first eight months of 2023, according to data released Tuesday by the American Library Association.

From Jan. 1 to Aug 31, the attempts sought to challenge or censor 1,915 titles, a 20% increase compared to the same months in 2022, the organization said. Last year saw the most challenges since the ALA began tracking book censorship more than two decades ago.

But the real numbers may even be higher. The ALA collects data on book bans through library professionals and news reports, and therefore, its numbers may not encompass all attempts to ban or censor certain books.

Most of the titles under scrutiny this year were written by or about people of color or members of the LGBTQ+ community, the group said.

Libraries are, of course, entitled to ignore these requests. But, as publicly-funded agencies, their ability to limit bigots from limiting their book selection relies heavily on the localities that provide their funding.

Those pushing for the silencing of LGBTQ voices are having an effect on local governments, some of which are no doubt more than happy to oblige the worst of their constituents. The ALA’s report shows governments are more than willing to back private calls for content removal with actual demands for censorship. (Emphasis in the original.)

Samuels Public Library (Front Royal, Va.) — A local pressure group called “Clean Up Samuels” held two book-banning BBQ events (“there will be beer and babysitting”) to fill out Request for Reconsideration forms for materials held at the library. Their efforts focused on children and young adult materials with representation of the lived experiences of those who are LGBTQIA+. Over 500 forms were completed for nearly 150 unique titles. At county board of supervisor meetings, group members called for the elimination of the library’s funding over the availability of “And Tango Makes Three,” “Pride Colors,” “Prince and Knight,” “I Love You Because I Love You, Plenty of Hugs” and other LGBTQIA+ titles. In June, the county board of supervisors voted to withhold 75 percent of the budget until the library takes action to “protect our children from sexually explicit material and ensure parents have control over their children’s reading choices.” The library director resigned in August.

Clinton (Tenn.) Public Library — In February 2023, the library board voted against a proposal to create a special section of their library to house books related to gender identity and sexual orientation. The conversation was spurred by challenges to “Grandad’s Camper,” “It Feels Good to be Yourself” and “Families like Mine” from members of a group that advocates for the censorship of library material with LGBTQIA+ representation. While the books were retained where they were originally shelved, members of the group went on to challenge numerous additional titles with LGBTQIA+ representation, including literary memoirs and sex education titles. The group has recently begun calling for the library director’s resignation and threatening community members who have publicly defended access to these resources. In August, the mayor of Anderson County and four county commissioners asked the sheriff to investigate whether 17 books available at public libraries, including Clinton Public Library, violate Tennessee’s criminal obscenity laws. Prosecutors have not brought charges.

This is definitely not the sort of thing that should be happening in the United States, which has protected free speech rights almost since its inception. The people backing these efforts tend to cite the First Amendment only when they feel their hatred isn’t being amplified by private companies and their social media services. There’s no “I don’t agree with what you say but will defend your right to say it” going on here. Instead, it’s just people seeking ways to stop people from saying things they don’t like, which is the antithesis of the same First Amendment principles they (mistakenly) believe should force third parties to broadcast their hatred to others.

The people backing these efforts are drowning in their ignorance. Unfortunately, they’re also dangerous because their bigotry is being embraced and weaponized by legislators just as stupid as they are. Hopefully, most of these efforts will be rejected by courts. But courts are no match for hatred that goes not only undeterred, but is actually welcomed, by government officials who think they’ve been elected to office to violate the rights of people they don’t like.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, book bans, free speech, gop, libraries