Book Publishers, Authors, and Parents Are Fighting Back Against Florida Book Bans

It is Banned Books Week and MidPoint addressed it on September 25, 2024. Recently, Florida and Texas are the states in competition for the most books banned in public schools, according to PEN America. Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina are not far behind in the competition for which state is the most retrograde, revisionist, and racist, at least in the book-banning event of the UNWOKE Olympics. But now, the books are fighting back. In a landmark federal lawsuit filed last month against the Florida Board of Education by a group of the major U.S. book publishers, The Authors’ Guild, public school parents, and students, a challenge has been mounted to the Florida law that bans books containing sexual content deemed “pornographic.”

Classic Books Have Been Banned in Florida

As a result of  Florida law HB 1069, hundreds of titles have been banned across the state since the bill went into effect in July 2023. The list of banned books includes classics such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, as well as contemporary novels by bestselling authors such as Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, and Stephen King. Among nonfiction titles, accounts of the Holocaust such as The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank have also been removed.

The First Amendment Protects the Right to Receive Ideas in Books

Our guests today to discuss this lawsuit were Dan Novack, V.P and General Counsel of Penguin Random House publishers, the lead plaintiff in the case, and Judi Hayes, an Orange County Public Schools parent suing on behalf of her sons who attend public school there. Dan Novack explained that the law was being challenged on First Amendment Free Speech grounds, primarily because it provides for the censorship and removal of any book that is alleged to be “pornographic,” even though “pornographic” is not a term with a real legal definition. According to Penguin Random House, unless a book is found to be “obscene” under the U.S. Supreme Court’s legal definition, it is lawful, but, ultimately, whether it should be available to students in schools is a determination best left to trained educators, librarians, and a child’s parents, and not to random individuals of varying sensibilities. Florida’s law instead censors and removes the targeted book first, upon someone’s objection, then keeps the book out of school libraries, all while the book goes through a vague and lengthy review process, which may vary by county and result in inconsistent determinations around the state applying to the same book. Both Dan Novack and Judi Hayes argued that the decision of whether or not a child is ready and mature enough to read certain books should be made by their parents and educators, and not by an outside individual seeking to remove access to books from all children, which is the process the law currently provides. While the State may argue that it has the right to restrict speech in schools to further “pedagogical interests,” the broad right to receive ideas is fundamental to the First Amendment; that right should be protected to the greatest extent against State restrictions.

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