Every Week Is Banned Book Week in Florida

By Diane Roberts

It’s Banned Books Week in Florida!

OK, the observance is in October, but it’s always Banned Books Week in Florida. Every day seems to bring another hissy fit from a state goon or “concerned” parent hell-bent on returning us to the glory days of censorship.

Hillsborough County School Superintendent Van Ayres has been attacked by parents and shouted at by state government for failing to remove materials chest-thumping Attorney General James Uthmeier claims are “pornographic“ from school libraries.

Ayres already had two books — ”Call Me By Your Name,” a gay romance with some sex scenes, and “Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts),” which has no sex scenes — taken off the shelves.

That was not enough for Uthmeier and some of the school board’s more hysterical members. So, in an abundance of caution, Ayres had 600 more removed from schools for a “review,” estimated to cost $350,000.

It was not enough: During a June school board meeting, one member called many surviving books “nasty and disgusting,” and another, obviously in need of smelling salts, said, “I, as a 56-year-old woman, mother of five and a physician, can’t look at these pages.”

She wants heads to roll: “Have you considered firing all your media specialists and starting from scratch with women and men who can read, or have a single shred of decency? These people that you trust to review these materials are abusing the children of your county. They’re child abusers.”

Here are some of those child-abusing materials: “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “What Girls Are Made Of,” “The Bluest Eye,” “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” “Slaughterhouse Five,” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Women and men who can — and do — read will know the authors of those books include a Booker Prize winner, a National Book Award winner, winner of a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Nobel Prize laureate.

Obviously, a bunch of perverts and losers.

‘Overbroad and unconstitutional’

The good news is that some at that ambush of a meeting objected to the objections.

One parent said it was not the state’s responsibility to decide what books her kid should have access to, it was hers: “Don’t tell me that it’s inappropriate if I think it’s appropriate for my child to read.”

The chair of the school board also took exception to the abuse heaped on school librarians (annoyingly now called “media specialists”) who are, in fact, experts in “age-appropriate” materials.

The even better news is that a federal judge has struck down the worst parts of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pet book-banning law as “overbroad and unconstitutional.”

A gaggle of big publishers including Simon and Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, plus a bunch of well-known authors and hacked-off parents, sued over the state’s vague decree that if a text “describes sexual conduct” it’s “pornographic.”

U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza, probably trying hard not to roll his eyes, pointed out the state can’t seem to define what they mean by “sexual conduct”: Consensual intercourse? A kiss? A rape? A seductive conversation? A hand sliding down (or up) to touch certain body parts which may or may not be named? Joyous marital congress?

The state’s arguments boiled down to:

• If a parent or random Moms for Liberty busybody think something is obscene and therefore an assault on the Moral Fiber of Our Youth, it is, even if they can’t quite get specific about what that means. They know obscenity when they see it, by golly.
• Books in public school libraries should promote “government speech,” i.e., the views espoused by the DeSantis regime.

Views such as, say, gays are not good; trans people are worse; sex outside of marriage is terrible; authority should not be questioned; climate change should not be studied.

Legal fees

According the state, “When the government speaks, it ‘can freely select the views that it wants to express, including choosing not to speak and speaking through the removal of speech that the government disapproves.”

According to DeSantis’ lawyers, school books are “not subject to the First Amendment.”

You thought free speech was protected in the Free State of Florida?

In 2023, PEN America file a lawsuit against the Escambia County School District for removing or restricting access to books some people found objectionable.

Escambia keeps losing in court, but that hasn’t stopped them from continuing to spend taxpayer money: at least $440,000. So far.

To make an obvious point, think about the field trips and school supplies that cash could have funded.

What’s all this book banning really about, anyway?

Authoritarianism for authoritarianism’s sake? That’s probably part of it.

Bullies love to bully.

Does it spring from deeply held religious notions of “purity” which hold that any exposure to what some people see as “immoral” words or images will pollute the minds of innocent children?

Y’all might remember the embarrassing kerfluffle at a Tallahassee charter school over showing students one of the great achievements of Western art.

The teacher leading a unit on the Renaissance had the temerity to display a picture of Michelangelo’s statue of David.

Some parents freaked out: You could see David’s junk!

As if half the planet does not sport similar junk.

Consider “And Tango Makes Three,” the famous true story of two male penguins raising a chick at New York’s Central Park Zoo.

That book has been snatched off library shelves all over Florida because, well, maybe because it could encourage tolerance toward flightless birds?

Fear factor

The banners seem to think stories with a gay hero or a trans character will turn kids gay or trans.

These people do not assume stories with gun violence will turn kids into mass shooters.

But books telling the truth about Native American genocide and slavery will make kids question the essential virtue of America.

Biographies of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King or novels by Ralph Ellison or Alice Walker will make white kids feel guilty.

It’s true the Left has been known to criticize certain books — ”The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” for racist language, or “Lolita” for its depiction of pedophilia — but rarely demand they be deep-sixed altogether.

Still, nobody can take away the Right’s title as the undisputed heavyweight champs of the book banning world.

Here’s the real reason for MAGA animosity to books: Fear.

They are scared of an America where white is not the default ethnicity, Christianity is not the dominant religion, heterosexuality is only one kind of “normal,” and history is a complicated tangle of high ideals and low crimes.

They cannot bear the thought their children will grow up in the 21st Century when all they cherished as solid and eternal can be questioned, even discarded.

So, they fight for control.

Until March of this year, a website called “BookLooks,” founded by a member of Moms for Liberty, touted a ratings system for books it deemed unsuitable for decent eyeballs.

BookLooks has shut down, saying that “after much prayer and reflection it has become apparent that His work for us here is complete and that He has other callings for us.”

However, the ratings system is still all over the Web, with “0″ (no sex, no swearing, no nudity, no booze or drugs), to “4″ denoting a text with “depictions of sexual organs in a state of arousal” plus oral sex of every kind.

Level 5, “Aberrant Content,” means stuff so filthy (“sadomasochistic abuse, assault, and ‘beastiality’” (sic) it’d burn the retinas of a saint.

‘Book of Books’

Take a look at the Moms’ “Book of Books,” a document that is at once alarming, absurd, and not a little prurient.

It quotes carefully curated and utterly out of context scenes of sex and sexual assault from Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” or Yaa Gyaasi’s “Homegoing.” (Newsflash: in a novel about slavery, you’re pretty much going to encounter sexual assault.)

They react with horror at novels about kids coming to terms with being gay, such as “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.”

They declare books dangerous for supposedly promoting “alternative gender ideologies.”

The “Book of Books” also lavishly shares sex act image after sex act image from graphic novels including “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer.”

That stuff is, admittedly, pretty raw, even hard to look at.

However, you can’t help wondering why they couldn’t have done with just two or three explicit pictures — and whether the compilers were getting a naughty thrill out of the whole thing.

We expect the Moms and their ilk to freak out over sex of any flavor, but even more of their ire has been directed at references to race, which they label “controversial social commentary” or just “hate.”

They don’t mean “hate” as in scenes of racist violence or oppression of people of color.

They mean people of color daring to expose or criticize or otherwise express strong disapproval of racism.

‘Nasty white folks’

Adding to the many transgressions of “The Bluest Eye,” they point to this sentence: “Nasty white folks is about the nastiest things they is.”

In Angie Thomas’ “The Hate U Give” the Moms clutch their pearls at: “A sixteen-year-old black boy is dead because a white cop killed him. What else could it be?”

Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” raises alarm for this: “Our white dentist believed that Indians only felt half as much pain as white people did, so he only gave us half the Novocain.”

This nonsense would be hilarious if it weren’t driving public education policy in Florida.

Those who want to ban or suppress books are closing the barn door after the horse has bolted and is now in the next town, sitting in a bar drinking a Mai Tai.

They’re also exposing themselves as the frightened creatures they are.

The bans will continue: Escambia County has removed another 400-plus books from its libraries without reviewing a single one.

The lawsuits will continue.

And the 21st century will continue, despite the state of Florida trying its best to drag us back to the 19th.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.