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book bans
Under Republican State Laws, US Book Bans Nearly Tripled Last School Year
PEN America found that 10,000 titles were censored over the last year as new laws went into effect in states including Iowa and Florida.
Sep 23, 2024
As Banned Books Week kicked off, a leading free expression group in the U.S. announced Monday that the number of books that were pulled from shelves or "challenged" by right-wing groups and Republican lawmakers skyrocketed to at least 10,000 over the last year with state legislatures passing new censorship laws.
PEN America found that the number of banned books tripled from the 2022-23 school year, when it had been 3,362.
New laws passed in Iowa and Florida were major drivers of censorship in libraries and public schools in the last school year, with 8,000 instances of book bans in the two states.
Under Iowa's S.F. 496, which took effect in July 2023, all materials containing descriptions or depictions of a "sex act" were determined to not be "age-appropriate" for K-12 students. The state banned 14 books from 2021-23, but the strict censorship law—which also bans classroom discussions of LGBTQ+ issues and gender identity—"led to thousands of book bans during the 2023-2024 school year," said PEN.
Florida's H.B. 1069 also focuses heavily on books that contain "sexual conduct," and its statutory review process requires that books be pulled from shelves while the titles are being evaluated after being challenged.
While "coordinated campaigns by a vocal minority of groups and individual actors" that claim to fight for "parents' rights" made for a "chilled atmosphere of overly cautious decision-making regarding the accessibility of books in public school libraries," said PEN, state legislation especially accelerated book bans.
Laws like those passed in Florida and Iowa made it "easier to remove books from schools without due process, or in some cases, without any formal process whatsoever," wrote Kasey Meehan and Sabrina Baêta of the group's Freedom to Read program. "Over a dozen new laws and state policies used to ban books in schools have been implemented, as have a number of district policies at the local level."
The organization identified Utah as having "the most extreme state book-banning bill currently in place," with H.B. 29 establishing what PEN called a "No Read List."
If any three school districts in Utah find that a title includes "objectively sensitive material," the book must be banned in all schools across the state.
The law went into effect in July and "is expected to result in significant book bans during the 2024-2025 school year."
PEN's analysis came out as the American Library Association (ALA) unveiled its own preliminary findings about banned books for the first eight months of 2024. While PEN considers a title to be "banned" if it is pulled from shelves at any point, even if access is later restored after review, the ALA counts books as banned only if they are permanently censored.
Using that criteria, the ALA found that from January 1-August 31, 2024, 414 challenges were made to 1,128 unique titles—compared to 695 challenges over the same period last year, affecting 1,915 titles.
Both the ALA and PEN said their tallies were likely undercounts of banned books.
PEN found that 13 books were banned in the last school year for the first time, including A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W.E.B. DuBois, Roots: The Saga of An American Family by Alex Haley, and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez.
The two analyses came out days after the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University's Pell Center published a poll showing, as program director Colin Woodard said, that "Americans, regardless of party, really hate public library book banning."
Sixty-six percent of respondents to the group's poll said they strongly opposed the censorship of books, including 90% of Democrats and 64% of independents.
Fifty-three percent of Republicans said they either strongly opposed or somewhat opposed book bans.
Despite the unpopularity of the bans, PEN warned that Republican-controlled state legislatures are likely to forge ahead in the coming months with more laws blocking people's access to books, particularly those that have themes related to LGBTQ+ identities, race and racism, and women's sexual experiences.
In South Carolina, the newly passed Regulations 43-170 prohibit books with "sex-related content" and empower the state Board of Education to ban books across the state, while in Tennessee, the Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022 just took effect in July. The law "requires schools to remove books that contain nudity, 'excess violence,' or sex-related content," and allows a state commission to evaluate possible book bans.
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Florida Parents Sue DeSantis Administration Over Book Ban Law
One of the plaintiffs said the Republican-authored law "is an attempt to steal important decisions away from parents."
Jun 06, 2024
Parents of students in Florida public schools sued the state's Board of Education on Thursday over a Republican-authored law allowing school district parents and residents to object to reading materials and force their removal from classrooms and libraries.
Three Florida parents joined the lawsuit, which was filed on their behalf by Democracy Forward, the ACLU of Florida, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The complaint argues that the law, signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis last year, benefits only parents who "hold the state's favored viewpoint: agreement with removing books and other material from schools, and disagreement with (and therefore seeking review of) decisions to retain books and other material."
"Parents who seek to retain materials, a viewpoint disfavored by the state, are excluded from the state review process," the complaint states. "Because H.B. 1069 and its implementing regulations provide a benefit—access to the state review process and the corresponding opportunity to petition the state through an administrative system that can provide a remedy—differently depending on a parent's perspective, they violate the First Amendment's ban on viewpoint discrimination, and should be invalidated."
Stephana Ferrell, one of the parent plaintiffs, said in a statement Thursday that the law "is an attempt to steal important decisions away from parents and allows those with a strong desire to withhold critical information on a variety of age-relevant topics to decide what books our kids have access to."
Ferrell joined the lawsuit after her request to review a decision by her child's school district to remove a book was denied. H.B. 1069 "requires sex ed programs to teach that sex is determined by reproductive function at birth and is binary and unchangeable and to use only materials approved by the state Department of Education," the ACLU of Florida explains.
"The state of Florida should not be able to discriminate against the voices of parents they disagree with," Ferrell added. "I deserve an equal voice in my child's education as any other parent."
Under DeSantis' leadership, Florida has banned books more aggressively than any other U.S. state in recent years. According to PEN America's latest report, 3,135 book bans were recorded across 11 school districts in fall of 2023.
"In Collier County, Florida, one book about sexual violence, Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr, was removed under H.B. 1069," PEN noted. "The law makes it easier to pull a book that 'depicts or describes sexual conduct' from school shelves; because of the lack of clarity around how to implement the law, the book was banned despite the fact that the rape at the center of the narrative is never directly described."
Samantha Past, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Florida, said Thursday that the state "has become a national leader in book banning, garnering mass attention for the unprecedented number of books that have been removed from our public schools."
"A review process that is available only to parents with certain viewpoints violates the First Amendment," said Past. "Denying parents an appropriate avenue to challenge censorship is undemocratic, and stifling viewpoints the state disagrees with is unlawful. Ultimately, these actions perpetuate the statewide attack on members of the Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ communities in an attempt to erase them from our history books."
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Alabama House Passes Bill That Could Be 'Used to Arrest Librarians'
"I feel like this is a violation of the First Amendment, and it's easily going to be abused," one Democratic lawmaker said.
Apr 26, 2024
The Alabama House of Representatives voted 72-28 on Thursday in favor of a bill that would apply the state's criminal obscenity laws to public libraries, public school libraries, and the people who work there.
Critics, including the Alabama Library Association, have warned that the bill could see librarians jailed and argued that it violates the First Amendment.
"This is a pig," Rep. Chris England (D-70), said during the debate, as AL.com reported. "It is a bad bill, and when you attempt to take what is normally non-criminal conduct and make it criminal, you bend yourself into ways that potentially not only violate the Constitution but potentially subject somebody to an illegal arrest with no due process."
"Why are they coming into libraries or thinking that they can come in and run the place better than us as professionals?"
House Bill 385 would allow anyone to write a letter to a school district superintendent or head librarian claiming a book is obscene. The Montgomery Advertiser explained further:
The library would be required to remove the materials within seven days of receiving the required written notice. Failure to remove said materials would result in a Class C misdemeanor upon the first offense, a Class B misdemeanor upon the second offense, and a Class A misdemeanor after the third and beyond. They may challenge the claim during the seven-day period.
In Alabama, a Class C misdemeanor carries a maximum sentence of three months in jail and fee of $500. The maximum sentence for a Class B misdemeanor is six months of jail time and a $3,000 fee, while a Class A misdemeanor carries a maximum sentence of one year in jail and a $6,000 fee.
The bill also adds to the definition of the "sexual conduct" minors must be protected from to include "any sexual or gender-oriented material that knowingly exposes minors to persons who are dressed in sexually revealing, exaggerated, or provocative clothing or costumes, or are stripping, or engaged in lewd or lascivious dancing, presentations, or activities in K-12 public schools, public libraries, and other public places where minors are expected and are known to be present without parental consent."
During the debate, England warned, "This process will be manipulated and used to arrest librarians that you don't like, and not because they did anything criminal. It's because you disagree with them," as The Associated Press reported.
Rep. Mary Moore (D-59) warned that the description of sexual conduct was loose enough that it could apply to students dressed up for prom, according to AL.com.
"Some of them would be under the jail because of this," Moore said.
Rep. Neil Rafferty (D-54) also expressed concerns that the language could apply to people in Halloween costumes or wearing summer clothing.
"I feel like this is a violation of the First Amendment, and it's easily going to be abused," he said, according to AP.
Rep. Barbara Drummond (D-103) said the bill was "putting lipstick on a pig," and added that the government "can't legislate morality," and that it would prevent children from "having an open mind," AL.com reported.
The bill comes amid increased politicization of libraries and attempts to ban books, especially in Republican-led states.
In Alabama, the legislature is also considering making $6.6 million in public library funding dependent on whether a library relocates materials deemed inappropriate for children, AL.com reported further. Nationwide, PEN America found that the total number of book bans in schools and libraries during just the first half of the 2023-2024 school year was greater than all the titles banned in 2022-2023, and that number had already jumped by 33% from the school year before.
The bill applying obscenity laws to libraries now heads to the Senate, but Alabama Library Association president Craig Scott told AP the state should expect to lose "lawsuit after lawsuit" if it becomes law.
"Why are they coming into libraries or thinking that they can come in and run the place better than us as professionals?" Scott asked.
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