In a key battleground in the larger debate about removing and restricting school books, plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Escambia County School Board asked a federal judge this week to order officials to return to the shelves seven titles that have been off-limits for over a year.
Lawyers for a parent who is a plaintiff also asked U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell to block the school board’s attorneys from taking the deposition of “J.N.,” a 7-year-old who just completed first grade.
Attorneys for authors, a publishing company, parents and a non-profit organization filed the lawsuit last year, contending the Escambia school board violated First Amendment and equal-protection rights in removing 10 books from school-library shelves and restricting access to more than 150 others.
Wetherell in January allowed the lawsuit to proceed, rejecting motions to dismiss First Amendment claims but dismissing plaintiffs’ equal-protection allegations.
The school board has argued it has authority to decide what books should be allowed and that a 2023 law (HB 1069) that set up a process for book challenges by members of the public helps shield it from the allegations.
In a motion for a preliminary injunction filed Monday, lawyers for the plaintiffs said Escambia officials had restricted 1,031 books under the county’s review process.
As of June 27, “some 178 challenged books remain restricted, although no decision has been made about the validity of the challenge,” according to the motion.
The motion said that, while the plaintiffs believe restrictions should be lifted on all books, the request for a preliminary injunction was limited to seven books that “have not been challenged for reasons that would require their restriction pending review under the (school) board’s own policies, and should be returned to the shelves immediately, while any review and resolution of the challenges proceeds.”
The board’s restrictions and removals “have disproportionately targeted books by or about people of color and/or LGBTQ people,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote.
Six of the seven books at issue include LGBTQ subject matter, while one tells the story of a Black teenager who is killed by a police officer and the impact on the teen’s friend, who witnessed the death.
In an example, a challenge to the book “Lady Midnight” flagged a passage that said: “‘Alexander Lightwood was Magnus’s boyfriend for over a decade. They could’ve gotten married under the new laws,” according to Monday’s motion.
The seven books at issue — which have been restricted for over a year — “were clearly challenged based on their positive portrayal of LGBTQ themes and other viewpoints” that challengers found objectionable, the motion said.
“For well over a year, defendant Escambia County School Board has restricted access to books in its school libraries based on nothing more than discriminatory viewpoint-based challenges by local residents who dislike the messages in those books. These restrictions violate the First Amendment and they need to end immediately,” the motion said.
Also this week, lawyers for the plaintiffs argued Wetherell should block the school board from taking the deposition of “J.N.,” daughter of plaintiff Ann Novakowski.
Novakowski “opposes the board’s request to depose J.N. as cumulative and unduly burdensome, given that the board can elicit the same information from her parent,” a motion for a protective order filed Tuesday said.
In the motion for a preliminary injunction, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that the only books required to be removed under the 2023 state law are those that are challenged on the basis of depicting or describing specific kinds of sexual conduct — which, the plaintiffs said, the seven books do not include.
“Notwithstanding the plain text of HB 1069, the board has apparently interpreted HB 1069 as requiring media specialists in each school to determine whether any books in the media specialist’s school’s library contain material describing or depicting sexual conduct,” the motion said.
The plaintiffs include parents, five authors, the publishing company Penguin Random House and the free speech group PEN American Center, Inc. They are represented by the legal advocacy group Protect Democracy Project and the Ballard Spahr LLP firm.
The lawsuit has played out amid controversy in Florida and other states about school officials removing or restricting access to books. As a sign of the controversy, Gov. Ron DeSantis in April signed a bill aimed at limiting book challenges filed by people who don’t have children in public schools, saying some people who filed mass objections to books made a “mockery” of the process.
The case is one of two federal lawsuits involving decisions by the Escambia County board to remove or restrict books. The other case centers on the children’s book “And Tango Makes Three.”
That book tells the story of two male penguins who raised a penguin chick at New York’s Central Park Zoo. Plaintiffs in the case, authors Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson and an Escambia County third-grade student, are seeking a preliminary injunction to require restoring the book to Escambia school library shelves.
Meanwhile, three parents on June 3 filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the process laid out for challenging school-library books and instructional materials in the 2023 law unconstitutionally discriminates against parents who disagree with “the state’s favored viewpoint.”
The law “only provides a mechanism for a parent to object to the affirmative use of material; it does not provide a mechanism for a parent to object to the lack of use or discontinued use of material,” the lawsuit said.
–Dara Kam, News Service of Florida
Atwp says
Good to see somebody standing up for their freedom to read what they want to read. Thank God some people still have fight in them.
Laurel says
Atwp: Agreed, 100%.
Joe D says
All schools have to do is give a list of the challenged books to the parents, and let them keep their individual son or daughter from reading those books ( keeping a list on file for future reference)….all this money and time wasted arguing about this issue!
Sherry says
This from a fellow Fine Arts America artist, Bijan Pirnia:
Here’s some more food for thought brought to you by Isaac Asimov (1920-92) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The Strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way throughout the political and cultural life nurtured by the false notion that democracy means my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
It is because of this cult of ignorance that some 40% of Americans still believe in “Young Earth Creationism.” They have deluded themselves into believing that some 6000 years ago one day God went POOF! and the universe popped into existence out of nowhere. It is because of this cult of ignorance that recently Louisiana governor signed a bill into law that requires public schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. It is because of this cult of ignorance that when public schools are cash-strapped, the first program they cut is art education. This is when art ennobles the heart and elevates the spirit. It is because of this cult of ignorance that compared to the rest of the industrialized democracies our public education is truly abysmal and pathetic.
I see examples of that all the time. For example, when I’m in a gas station or a similar place, my total comes to $ 42:67. I give the clerk who is a high school graduate 52:67. All he or she has to do is give me back 10 bucks; but he just stands there and looks at the money I gave him. He’s mentally frozen. He spent 12 years of his life in public school; but he can’t make such a simple calculation in his head. Our educational system is honestly in a free-fall. I could go on ‘n on; but you get the point. We live in a country in which you can graduate from high school without knowing anything of substance. What a waste of human potential.
Sherry says
More on the subject from BIJAN PIRNIA
Book banning and the defunding of art programs in some schools are part and parcel of a much larger phenomenon we call THE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA, which has been going on for decades. Going by what I’ve been reading and what I see in the world around me, the vast majority of the population has no clue what is happening. We have a nation that, for the most part, has checked out emotionally and intellectually. Day in and day out, we’re glued to some kind of stupid little screen, be it smart phone, television, or God knows what else. We have smart phones and dumb people.
More than ever before, we live a fictitious, delusional, virtual reality we call Social Media, which is anything but social. If you want to have a much better idea what I mean by all that, you would be well-advised to check out THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON by one of my favorite authors, Susan Jacoby. You can also watch her interviews and lectures online for free. Another one could be FANTASYLAND by Kurt Andersen. Those are just a couple of example. There are MANY MANY more.
For now, here’s something by one of the greatest intellectuals the world has ever known : Carl Sagan (1934-96.) He wrote, “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time when the United States is a service and information economy, when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues, when people have lost the ability to set their own agendas, or knowledgeably question those in authority, when, clutching to our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our political future in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what is true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites, (now down to 10 seconds or less) lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but essentially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
It is truly terrifying that everything Mr. Sagan predicted in the 1990s has come to pass within just one generation or so. Here’s an example of pseudoscience bullshit that Mr. Sagan mentioned. Years ago, senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma brought a snowball to the senate floor to “prove” that climate change is a hoax. How stupid can you be. Here’s another example of our slide into superstition and darkness that Mr. Sagan mentioned. When George W. Bush was asked if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq, he replied, “No, I have consulted my heavenly father.” Apparently, his big daddy in the clouds told him it was ok to roll into another country with guns blazing when that country posed no threat to us. The war in Iraq was sold to us based on a pack of lies which cost the lives of some 5500 Americans and over 100,000 Iraquis. Our stupidity reminds me a statement by Albert Einstein. He said, “Two things are infinite : the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Sherry says
Now here is a book desantis and trump would hate:
Susan Jacoby’s national bestseller, The Age of American Unreason, was first published in 2008. In this new edition, she explains why many of the cultural trends she explored a decade ago—a public attention span reduced by digital dependency, the inability to distinguish between facts based on serious scholarly and journalistic research and rumors spread by social media, and the presence of continuous digital distractions—had more to do with the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 than the conventional explanations usually advanced in the press.
Jacoby argues forcefully that a geometric progression in public ignorance was much more important than Trump’s potent appeal to anachronistic white American nationalism, Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings as a candidate, Russian interference in the electoral process, or the gap
between “the elites” and ordinary workers. “Fake news,” a phrase that did not exist in 2008, can only flourish in a culture in which increasing numbers of people lack the critical thinking skills—and refuse to take the time—to distinguish between the fake and the real.
If you read The Age of American Unreason in 2008, The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies , with new research based on changes in American politics and culture during the past decade, will provide answers to the question of how we got from Barack Obama in 2008 to Trump in 2016. The author makes a convincingly case against the short-term answers being offered by politicians and much of the media. To understand what happened and why, Americans must face the long-term erosion of education, knowledge, and respect for reason. In a culture of unreason, people turn to unreasonable politicians who offer unreasonable, or fake, solutions to very real problems.