According to PEN International, Florida is the state that bans more books than any other state. The state denies that it bans any book, because a controversial book can be obtained from public libraries or bookstores or online. Most of the challenges to books come from a small number of people, often affiliated with the odious Moms for Liberty.
Three mothers in Florida are pushing back against the book banners. They sued the state because it provides support to those who want to ban books, but not to those who oppose the bans. The stories were written by Leslie Postal of The Orlando Sentinel.
Three Florida mothers sued the state Thursday, claiming it violated their First Amendment rights by providing help to parents who want books yanked from public schools but denying that same aid to them when they want to fight school book bans.
“It’s just not fair,” said Stephana Ferrell, an Orange County mother of two and one of the plaintiffs.
The state, she added in a statement, “should not be able to discriminate against the voices of parents they disagree with.”
Two St. Johns County parents are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed in federal court in Tallahassee, the latest chapter in the ongoing debate about what books should be available to Florida’s schoolchildren.
The lawsuit argues that “Florida’s leaders only welcome input from those parents advocating for removing books from schools.”
In response to a request for comment on the lawsuit, a spokesperson at the Florida Department of Education said via email, “There are no books banned in Florida. However, sexually explicit material and instruction are not suitable for classrooms.”
At issue is the controversial state law (HB 1069) adopted last year by the Republican-led Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis. It expanded the prior year’s law “parental rights in education law,” which critics dubbed “don’t say gay.”
The law “allowed parents who wanted certain books removed from schools to appeal to the state, if their local school district did not side with them. But the three parents said that when they objected to their school districts’ decisions to remove or to restrict the availability of certain books, they had no recourse.”
Orange County Public Schools, for example, last year decided to remove the book “Shut Up!” by Marilyn Reynolds from all campuses after a parent complained the book, used in a class at Timber Creek High School, was “explicit and pornographic.”
The book deals with child sexual abuse, and the School Library Journal called it a “wise novel” that “is an important addition for any collection serving teens.”
Ferrell, who helped found the Florida Freedom to Read Project to fight school book bans, tried to challenge OCPS’ decision. But both the district, and eventually state Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, denied her request, saying the “state review process” was only for parents who wanted books removed and were unhappy their district did not agree.
Those parents can appeal to the state for a special magistrate to review the school board’s decision. The special magistrate then makes a recommendation to the State Board of Education — made up of DeSantis appointees — and the board then issues a final decision.
If the state board agrees with the parent, the cost of hiring the magistrate must be paid by the school district that had its decision overturned.
The two St. Johns parents objected when their school district last week said only 11th and 12th graders could take out the novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, and several other books, including “The Freedom Writers Diary,” about a high school teacher and her students who “used writing to change themselves and the world around them,” and the memoir by Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was kidnapped at age 11 and held prisoner for 18 years, giving birth to two children by her abductor.
Those books were challenged by a woman who has filed 92 of the 114 book challenges dealt with in St. Johns County schools since 2021, according to Jax Today, and she objected to them because they included references to “sex abuse, violence and hate.”
The lawsuit noted that the woman who challenged the books did not have children in the public schools when the St. Johns County School Board took up her objections last week.
The St. Johns mothers, Nancy Tray and Anne Watts Tressler, objected to the school board’s decision, with Tray telling the board parents could keep their own children from reading those books, or others they disliked, “without eliminating availability for every single high school student in St. John’s County, ” the lawsuit said.
Both mothers were told there was no avenue for them to appeal the school board’s decision and realized it would be “futile” to appeal to the state, the lawsuit added.
The sponsors of HB 1069 touted the law as a way to “protect the rights of parents to have a say in their children’s education,” the lawsuit noted, but “this legislation only benefits those parents who hold the State’s favored viewpoint: agreement with removing books and other material from schools.”
The law, and the regulations adopted to implement it, provide different benefits “depending on a parent’s perspective” so “they violate the First Amendment’s ban on viewpoint discrimination, and should be invalidated,” the lawsuit said.
Here are some of the books that the state or rightwing parents consider “sexually explicit:”
Hundreds of books, including a classic by Leo Tolstoy and a storybook by beloved children’s author Maurice Sendak, have been pulled from Florida school libraries this fall as administrators continue to scrutinize collections for works they fear violate new state laws.
Seminole County Public Schools has removed more than 80 books, including the National Book Award winner “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” this school year, and restricted access to 50 others by requiring parental permission or making them available only to high school students, according to Katherine Crnkovich, a district spokeswoman.
In Hernando County north of Tampa, six picture books were removed recently from school libraries, including Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen” and David Shannon’s “No, David!” They all have illustrations that show kids’ naked bottoms, or, in one case, a goblin’s bare derriere..
In Collier County in southwest Florida, more than 300 novels have been taken from shelves, packed up and put in storage. They include works by Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Ayn Rand, Leo Tolstoy and Alice Walker.
The novels “Moll Flanders” (published in 1772), “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (published in 1937), “Slaughter-House Five” (published in 1969) and “The Kite Runner” (published in 2003) all met the same fate as did Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (published in 1878).
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was banned as was Little Rock Nine by Marshall Poe about the integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good for the parents that are challenging Florida book bans. Authoritarians seek absolute power, and there is little room for opposing points of view. Challenging these biased laws is a way to expose how discriminatory and unfair these one-sided laws are. However, if more MAGA justices continue to be appointed, it will become harder to get an unbiased ruling from a biased judge.
I recently taught in a Flor-uh-duh high school. One day, in my SENIOR DEBATE CLASS, I had the kids write a couple topics they would be interested in debating on a piece of paper and hand them in. The kids wanted me to read them aloud, so I did. One of the topics was transgender bathrooms. I read that topic along with the 60 or so others. That’s all I did. I read that, and 59 other topics, aloud.
ONE OF MY COLLEAGUES, whose 16-year-old daughter was in my class, reacted to this BY GOING TO MY PRINCIPAL AND REQUESTING THAT I BE FIRED. A fundamentalist nutcase whose overly protected daughter is going to have a rude awakening when she goes out into the real world.
Not unsurprising, but infuriating, story, Bob.
Thanks, Threatened. The weird thing is that I did not discuss the topic with the kids and did not assign it. Simply reading it aloud with a list of other topics was sufficient for this fellow teacher to ask that I be fired.
Warm regards to you and yours, TOW!
According to PEN international, they pledge themselves to oppose such evils of a free press as mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood and distortion of facts for political and personal ends. Is pretending that schools are in charge of what kids read a deliberate falsehood? Is pretending that yanking books from schools, could limit what kids read or think, a distortion of facts? Is pretending that rulers are hobbled by books, a distortion of facts? Good books still aren’t in charge of bad men.
To an ENORMOUS extent, schools are in charge of most of what kids read, especially younger kids and poor kids. Books are expensive.
And it is emphatically NOT pretense to claim that yanking books from schools limits what kids can and do read. That’s the point of it, and it works, sadly.
Books should not be yanked from shelves on the basis of a single complaint. A far more reasonable approach would be for a parent to write a note stating that his or her child should not be allowed to borrow a particular title. This approach is far too reasonable for the book banning crowd. They prefer the chaos and burden the whole book banning theatrics and media attention attached to the process. It is clearly another way to undermine public education.
Nailed it
A kid who actually reads Moll Flanders or Anna Karenina should get a freaking medal. These are great books, but they are quite demanding for and not particularly appealing to adolescent readers, who haven’t the backround or world knowledge to grok them.
Most of the books listed are good books, and lots of them are targeted for petty, dumb reasons. As far as the sexual exploitation of teens go, most high school students can handle the material. Since they are in the age group that is often exploited, reading a book may help some teens from getting involved in an exploitative situation. It’s like the right wing wants schools to teach sexual abstinence, but the result is often a higher number of STDs and teen pregnancies. Burying one’s head in the sand does not eliminate problems. Ignorance is more likely to lead to harmful decisions.
There is an extremely high positive correlation between the amount of religiosity in an area and the number of teen STDs and pregnancies. This isn’t an accident.
Imagine some young person thumbing through Anna Karenina, looking for a sex scene. ROFL. Good luck with that.
Yesterday, DeSantis defunded all state spending on grants for the arts – $32 million.
DeSantis is spending millions on his private military. No $ for the arts.
Of course he did.