Governor Ron DeSantis claims that Florida isn’t banning books, which may be technically true, yet demonstrably false. Librarians and school district officials are removing books from school and classroom libraries to comply with state law, until the books have been screened for any offensive sexual or racial language.
PEN America reported that more than 1,600 books have been removed from circulation until they have received approval from school officials. The big joke in Escambia County is that a dictionary is in the Escambia list of books that possibly violate the law. Actually, five dictionaries!
But many other books are on Escambia’s list that have been read by generations of students.
Is it fair to say that such lists are censorship or banning? I say yes. What do you think?
PEN America posted this statement:
It has come to this: Escambia County, Florida, schools have banned the dictionary.
Five dictionaries are on the district’s list of more than 1,600 books banned pending investigation in December 2023, along with eight different encyclopedias, The Guinness Book of World Records, and Ripley’s Believe it or Not – all due to fears they violate the state’s new laws banning materials with “sexual conduct” from schools.
Biographies of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Nicki Minaj, and Thurgood Marshallare on the list, alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Black Panther comics by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Feminism Book was banned along with The Teen Vogue Handbook: An Insider’s Guide to Careers in Fashion.
The list obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project also includes Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. The Princess Diaries and 14 other books by Meg Cabot have been taken from libraries, alongside books by David Baldacci, Lee Child, Michael Crichton, Carl Hiassen, Jonathan Franzen, John Green, John Grisham, Stephen King (23 of them), Dean Koontz, Cormac McCarthy, Celeste Ng, James Patterson, Jodi Picoult,and Nicholas Sparks. Conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly’s two books, Killing Jesus and Killing Reagan, were also banned pending investigation.
PEN America, Penguin Random House, and a diverse group of authors joined with parents and students in Escambia County for a first of its kind federal lawsuit alleging that an earlier set of book bans and restrictions violate their rights to free speech and equal protection under the law. A hearing in the case is scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 10.
If you open the link, you can see the list of banned books in Escambia County.
Here are a few that caught my eye:
Books of Greek and Roman myths
Baroque and Rococo Art
Five books by Maya Angelou
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Sixteen books by Meg Cabot
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
Multiple books about sexually transmitted diseases
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield -Adapted for Young Readers
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Five novels by William Faulkner
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
I’m stopping here. You get the drift. Scan the rest of the list and see what you think.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good morning Diane and everyone,
Will the schools also be banning computers and cell phones? Shouldn’t those also be screened for offensive racist and sexual language and images before we let students use them in school??? Certainly a computer or cell phone has many more offensive sexual images than A Tale of Two Cities.
Mamie, of course you are right. Porn is easy to access on the internet—and far more sexually explicit than any of the banned books.
Insanity. How about …
“Banning the Bible!”
That was attempted in the district in which I teach in Utah. The ban was overturned after an outcry that got the state legislature involved
Removing books from school and classroom libraries
can’t stop the kids from getting them.
Pretending to be in charge of what they will read
is just that, pretending.
YES!
Agreed. Even the CCP in mainland China can’t stop people from buying censored books on the black market there. And that’s China.
Maybe this Ruthless Ron DeSantis’ form of censorship through fear (fear of librarians, teachers and administrators who don’t want to be fired or the center of right wing threats if they are singled out in the media) will get children and adolescents reading on their own.
All of these culture laws based on the perception of a few individuals generally serve the interests of a few over the rights of many. Florida is ground zero for this type of legislation, and the Florida panhandle that Matt Gaetz represents, where this case will be heard, is about 80% GOP. These restrictive laws started with “stand your ground,” and it continues with abortion rights, the privatization of education and the widespread book banning campaign. In each of these cases the interests of few take priority over the needs of many. Instead of focusing on protecting rights, these extremist conservative laws are a series of prohibitive and punitive laws that defend minority rights and restrict the freedom of most citizens.
“PEN America – with Penguin Random House, authors, and parents of Escambia students affected by the book bans – filed the suit in May 2023. The plaintiffs are represented by Ballard Spahr LLP and Protect Democracy, a non-partisan, pro-democracy, nonprofit group. ” The book banning trial will start this morning in Pensacola, FL. https://pen.org/press-release/oral-arguments-set-for-1-10-on-groundbreaking-federal-lawsuit-challenging-book-bans-in-florida/
Here’s what the laughable DeSantis campaign teaches:
The country has, for the most part, moved, culturally, far, far, far beyond where some folks in the cultural backwater that is Florida still live. Most people look at Ron Ron’s tantrums about Drag Queen Story Hour or Disney or school libraries or the immigrant people who support Florida’s freaking economy by picking her fruits and vegetables or whatever and just find them to be what they are: backward and childish. They look at him onstage in his platform heels, trying his fake smile and waggling his fists in the air in an attempt at forcefulness and say to themselves, “I think I hear a baby crying.”
Then most people should go to the polls. I think Florida is frozen by fear appeals, and the people who do the work you describe don’t vote.
Thanks for the vivid imagery of DeSantis as a crying baby! He comes across so repulsively entitled, and he is a big phony. His whole campaign is about grievance so he has nothing important to say. All anyone has to do is look at what he has done to, not for, Florida. He and his cronies work for the 1% , big insurance, big energy and religious bigots, etc. There is no benefit to working people other than the endless, distraction of culture wars.
Thanks to Ron Ron’s appointments to the board overseeing electric utilities, my electric bill just DOUBLED. This is going to be devastating, come next July and August, for poor people.
Right wing extremists including DeSantis plan to take from the many including public schools, public earned benefits and hard fought for rights and hand it all to a few entitled vandals like the Kochs, the Waltons and DeVos clan while working families cope with the continuous loss.
BTW, Ron and his cronies are working to privatize the water departments. If this happens, the rates will increase tremendously to pay for all the profit the privatizers will extract from working families and retirees.
YUP. No doubt about it. And lord only knows what effects this will have on water quality. Ron Ron himself had no problem with simply dumping millions of gallons of water filled with phosphate mining tailings into Tampa Bay.
An R.L. Stein book made the honor list. So did Slaughterhouse-Five and Tom Sawyer. After seeing Ayn Rand on the list, I went looking for one specific author analogous to the ultra-conservative writer, but he was missing. If you’re going to ban books, he should headline the list. His first name was Adolf.
I know this has been noted many times but needs to be restated. Do these Nazi fools also want to ban the “Bible”? That book definitely has some passages that will not meet the standards for students to read in Florida.
I guess people in Florida and across the United States want their children and future children to grow up ignorant about the world around them. We know from history if the population is kept ignorant about what is going on around them then they are easier to control by the government. Remember 1920-30″
Of course, in terms of what media kids in Florida will actually consume, all this is irrelevant. These Reich-wingers don’t get it. Muzzling teachers and gutting libraries won’t stop the tsunami of cultural change that is occurring. If anything, the censorship will make their kids more eager for a little wildness.
BTW, the horrific culture that the Reich-wingers decry has led to this outcome: STDS and teen pregnancies are WAY down from historical levels, young people are having WAY LESS sex, and they are waiting longer.
Why?
Because they know more despite the morons in the Minivan Taliban, those Ku Klux Karens.
The Minivan Taliban really needs those dictionaries. They could use them to look up the following:
self-defeating. compound participle. Action that defeats its own purpose, like book-banning (which makes the banned books more attractive and increases their sales) and censorship of sexual materials (which leads to ignorance about sex and sexuality and because of this ignorance, and from the POV of the censors, counterintuitively, to more promiscuity, unwanted pregnancy, venereal disease, susceptibility to grooming, early sexual behavior, and sexual assault and abuse).
We have seen in our culture over the past few decades an enormous liberalization with regard to sexual materials in the media, including in the music that junior-high-school and high-school kids listen to, the film that they watch, the books and articles they read, and, of course, on the internet.
And what has been the result? Well, young people are delaying sex by a lot over historical levels, they are having a lot less sex, they are contracting fewer venereal diseases, they are having fewer pregnancies, they are more likely to report abuse or assault. In every case, the situation IS DRAMATICALLY IMPROVED?
Why? Well, because they know a lot more than did kids in the 1970s. They are hip to the issues, or more so than they were.
Knowledge empowers. Censorship limits the dissemination of knowledge. It weakens and destroys.
But none of this will matter to the Minivan Taliban, ofc, because they don’t care if some teenager contracts AIDS and dies or gets pregnant and has to drop out of high school or contracts chlamydia or gonorrhea that then causes birth defects. Their attitude: They deserve it. It’s God’s will. What REALLY gets them is that they had LGBTQX people, and so they want Taliban or Ugandan-style repression of anything related to sexual orientation and gender identity. In other words, it’s NOT ABOUT WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE KIDS. IT’S ABOUT BIGOTRY.
I’m not so sure the cause is empowerment and knowledge, as opposed to self-siloing due to social media. Kids today spend more time staring and poking at their phones than they used to spend watching television. And unlike television, the phones poke back. The nature of a “social life” has changed. Less direct interaction with people and peers. Less sex. I don’t have evidence for this at my finger tips but it seems right. I’ve seen surveys showing condom usage has sharply declined after 2010 or so, so I’m skeptical of the idea that kids have been empowered by knowledge.
Well, I taught high school recently. The kids were not as naive as they were when I taught years ago. I didn’t exactly hold conversations with them about this stuff, but I overheard and gleaned things. I think they were a lot more knowledgeable and that this made a difference.
Remember that in the 1970s and earlier, young people basically didn’t have a clue because they were taught almost nothing.
Yes, self-siloing is occurring, much to their detriment psychologically, and this is doubtless a partial cause, but I think it pretty clear that kids today know more about this stuff than they did in, say, the 1970s.
On the one hand, I sometimes meet very impressive young people who seem to have their sh!t together in a way we didn’t when we were young. On the other hand I see teens casually vaping 80+% THC pot at 8 am, boys flocking to hyper-retrograde and pernicious personalities like Andrew Tate (who makes Andrew Dice Clay look quaint) online, and the absolute insanity that is TikTok. I’m a glass half-empty guy when it comes to this stuff. And I think the glass is more than half-empty.
I can’t agree. I taught in southern Florida. Redneck central. But the kids were alright, far, far, far more hip to everything than their parents were. I was quite impressed by them, and I taught standard-issue mostly middle-class mixed-race kids.
I guess we’ll hand our samples off to the statistician experts and reconvene in a couple weeks.
Haaa!
Ignorance, especially about sex and drugs, is the OPPOSITE OF BLISS.
Good teachers care a lot about their kids. If they don’t care a lot about kids, they shouldn’t be teaching. And so they get really angry when people harm kids, for example, by keeping them ignorant.
Look at the stats by state or by county. Which have the highest rates of teen pregnancy? The highest rates of teen STDs? The earliest onset of sexual activity?
The red ones. The ones with draconian sex ed laws. The ones whose libraries are being emptied by the American Taliban.
If you keep kids in the dark, here’s what will happen: they will act out of ignorance, and some will be maimed for life (for example, unable in the future to conceive because of a sexually transmitted disease) or even die! And if you are a member of the Minivan Taliban and work to keep kids in the dark, then you are responsible for these maimings and these deaths. YOU. THEY ARE ON YOU. YOU ARE CAUSING THEM.
If you are a teacher, part of your job is to protect kids from people who would harm them. So, that’s why teachers need to fight Ku Klux Karens. It’s their duty, for the sake of their charges, to keep them from harm.
You’ve definitely been in touch with “kids” longer than I have, though.
I call them kids even though they think that they are adults because they aren’t adults. Teenagers are still children. Yes, they know more, but they are also immature in significant ways. In particular, they don’t have the brain mechanisms for self-control and planning that adults have, and they are extremely emotionally labile. And these are all the more reasons to ensure that they are informed. Forewarned is forearmed, the saying goes. Exactly right. Adults need to make sure that kids know about dangerous situations before they get into those situations.
Sorry my comments are coming through at odd delays so I’ve got no rhythm here.
It’s as though the GOP is intent on spreading ignorance, as far and wide as possible.
It’s as if right wing religion wants to spread ignorance
as far and wide as possible and the’ve found the power base, the GOP, to make it happen.
Jefferson- in every age, in every country, the priest aligns with the despot.
Diane posted recently about a law in Ohio impacting gender affirming care. Thirteen hours ago Catholic Vote’s political director who lives in Ohio, was quoted, “Catholic Vote is overjoyed,” at the outcome of a vote in the Ohio House. The vote was along party lines, 65-28.
The Catholic Conference of Ohio testified as expected on the bill.
There’s a locus of origin for the laws that seek to make America, anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ and ignorant. Until that origin is targeted, the saying, keep doing the same things and expect a different outcome rings true.