Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants you to know he’d never dream of engaging in mass censorship. He
held a recent event challenging criticism of his classroom book restrictions as a “hoax,” releasing a
video suggesting only “porn” and “hate” are targeted for removal.
There’s
a big problem with DeSantis’s claims: The people deciding which books
to remove from classrooms and school libraries didn’t get the memo. In
many cases, the notion that banned books meet the highly objectionable
criteria he detailed is an enormous stretch.
This week, Florida’s Martin County
released a list of dozens of books targeted for removal from school libraries, as officials struggle to interpret
a bill
DeSantis signed in the name of “transparency” in school materials. The
episode suggests his decrees are increasingly encouraging local
officials to adopt censoring decisions with disturbingly vague
rationales and absurdly sweeping scope.
Numerous
titles by well-known authors such as Jodi Picoult, Toni Morrison and
James Patterson have been pulled from library shelves. The removal list
includes Picoult’s novel “The Storyteller” about the granddaughter of a
Holocaust survivor who meets an elderly former SS officer. It contains
some violent scenes told in flashbacks from World War II and an assisted
suicide.
“Banning
‘The Storyteller’ is shocking, as it is about the Holocaust and has
never been banned before,” Picoult told us in an email.
“Martin
County is the first to ban twenty of my books at once,” Picoult said,
slamming such bans as “a shocking breach of freedom of speech and
freedom of information.” A coastal county in the southeastern part of
the state, Martin County is heavily Republican.
Picoult
said she’s puzzled by the ban, because she does not “write adult
romance,” as objections filed against her books claimed.
“Most
of the books pulled do not even have a single kiss in them,” Picoult
told us. “They do, however, include gay characters, and issues like
racism, disability, abortion rights, gun control, and other topics that
might make a kid think differently from their parents.”
“We
have actual proof that marginalized kids who read books about
marginalized characters wind up feeling less alone,” Picoult continued.
“Books bridge divides between people. Book bans create them.”
In
the case of “The Storyteller” and virtually all the other books by
Picoult and others that are getting removed, the county’s removal
directive cites
guidance
from Florida’s Department of Education. It directs educators to “err on
the side of caution,” urging them to nix material that they wouldn’t be
“comfortable reading aloud.”
The
state’s absurdly vague directive seems almost designed to invite abuse,
not only by school officials making the decisions, but also by parents
who call for removals. Underscoring the point, documents obtained from
the county by the
Florida Freedom to Read Project, which were shared with us, cite one person as the primary objector to virtually all of these books.
That
objector? Julie Marshall, who in addition to being a concerned parent
also heads the local chapter of Moms For Liberty, a group that pressures
school boards and officials to remove all kinds of materials that
violate conservative ideology on race and sexuality.
We
emailed Marshall to ask if she was aware of other parents who filed
objections to all these books. She didn’t reply. A spokesperson for the
Martin County school district pointed out that there’s a
process in place governing how these decisions are made.
Other
titles getting removed include “Mighty Jack and the Goblin King,” a
graphic novel featuring kids traveling through a magic portal and
fighting monsters. One citizen (not Marshall this time) filed an
objection noting that at one point the sister yells at her brother,
“Jack, you ass! Stop it!”
Then
there’s “Drama,” a graphic novel about a school play in which a boy who
wears a dress as part of the production has an onstage kiss with
another boy actor. Just wait until these parents hear about “
Twelfth Night.”
Those
last two books are apparently being removed only from elementary
schools. “But if the rationale to remove the books is as thin as it
seems, that alone is egregious,” Jonathan Friedman, who oversees PEN
America’s tracking of book bans, told us. “You can’t just remove books
from schools because one person objects. That’s absurd. Unfortunately,
that’s what seems to have happened here.”
As
we’ve detailed,
the multiple new laws DeSantis has signed combine deliberately vague
directives with the threat of frightening penalties to create
a climate of uncertainty and fear.
This appears deliberately designed to get school officials to err on
the side of censorship, and to get teachers to muzzle themselves to
avoid accidentally crossing fuzzy lines into violations of orthodoxy. It
invites lone activists to designate themselves veritable commissars of
local book purging.
In Martin County, this strategy is unfolding exactly as intended.
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