Publishers Push to Control Florida School Libraries
Parents and taxpayers have the right to decide what books will be in public school libraries shelves. That's not book banning or censorship; it is discretion and assumption of responsibility.
Legislation signed into law last year by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida sets standards for public schools and school boards to maintain in teaching about human reproduction, bans “classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity [in] prekindergarten through grade 8” in government schools, and “prohibits district school boards from imposing or enforcing requirements that personnel or students be referenced with pronouns that do not correspond with biological sex as defined in the bill, subject to specified exceptions.”
In addition, the law “requires the suspension of materials alleged to contain pornography or obscene depictions of sexual conduct, as identified in current law, pending resolution of an objection to the material. A district school board must also discontinue the use of any material the board does not allow a parent to read aloud.”
This provision gives parents the right to question the inclusion of particular books in school libraries, The Wall Street Journal reports:
Florida’s statute, also known as HB 1069, requires districts to set up a process for a parent or resident of the county to contest school and classroom library materials that they believe contain pornographic or sexual content.
The new law puts school libraries explicitly under the authority of the local school district, which of course they should be:
Under the new Florida law, challenged books must be removed from circulation within five school days pending a district review. Books may be restored if a district determines that they are free of pornographic material. Non-pornographic materials containing descriptions or depictions of “sexual conduct” can stay on shelves but are subject to grade or age restrictions.
As noted above, however, the district must allow parents to read aloud from those books in school board meetings. That will lead either to book removals or very spicy meetings.
Naturally, publishers are suing Florida over the possibility that school districts may someday keep some of their books out of children’s hands. The publishers are referring to this as censorship, the Journal reports:
The country’s major publishing houses say Florida has unleashed a wave of censorship. The county school districts implementing the state law have eliminated hundreds of titles from their collections, according to the lawsuit, including, in some districts, the removal of literary classics such as Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.”
“Plaintiffs take issue with the removal of books under the guise of ‘pornography’ that are not remotely obscene,” the lawsuit states.
The people behind the lawsuit claim Florida schools are taking classic books such as War and Peace and A Tale of Two Cities off the shelves. I cannot see why that is a problem: any nine-year-old smart enough to get something out of War and Peace is surely more than clever enough to get his or her hands on a copy.
That is obviously just a desperate scare story. The real complaint about lack of access arises from leftists’ frustration at being denied another entry point into the minds of Florida children who happen to be lucky enough to live in school districts with rational parents and conscientious school board members. The law does nothing to prevent children from reading whatever strikes their fancy. Proponents of the law are only saying some items should not be in the school library, which they happen to be paying for.
In addition, parents and taxpayers do in fact have a right to complain about others’ children being given access to certain books in government-run schools. What other people read (and listen to, and watch, and play, etc.) affects us through its effect on them. That does not justify government censorship of what adults can publish and sell to one another, but it does place the government in a position of responsibility toward children in its schools, and it obligates school staff to exercise good judgment in what they make available to children.
The publishers attacking the law are powerful, multinational corporations that could survive quite well without the money from Florida schools but are not about to stand idly by while the people of Florida decide what books the state’s taxpayer-funded schools can buy:
Leading the lawsuit are Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks and HarperCollins Publishers, which like The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp.
The publishers are challenging the law as “vague and confusing,” the Journal reports, and they claim that it violates their constitutional rights. “The lawsuit says Florida’s law violates the First Amendment rights of publishers, authors and students by motivating sweeping book bans,” the Journal story reports.
The claim that the provision is vague and confusing is easy to see through. The publishers are under no obligation whatsoever to supply books to Florida libraries. The libraries can buy the books if they want them. If parents object to specific books, the local school district will decide whether to retain them or discard them. In either case, the books have already been paid for, so the publisher loses nothing.
The First Amendment claim is equally spurious, and it raises an important principle: the choice not to buy a particular book or other cultural product is not censorship. The state of Florida is not preventing these publishers from printing whatever books they may choose to produce. These companies are not harmed by the choice to discard their books after buying them or by not purchasing them in the first place. Not buying something is completely different from preventing it from being sold.
The only people who have a right to decide what books get into Florida’s government-school libraries are the people of Florida. Publishers have no “right” to have other people be forced to buy their books or even put them on public shelves if provided for free. Florida’s new law puts the authority over library holdings where it belongs: with the people and the school-district leaders they elect.
Other states would do well to take a leaf out of that book.