The far-right mania for culture war doesn’t seem to be slowing, despite the big electoral losses among Moms for Censorship-backed candidates in the fall elections, or the recent threesome revelations about Moms for Fascism co-founder Bridget Ziegler and her (allegedly) rapey husband Christian, the now-shitcanned Florida GOP chair. Ms. Ziegler wasn’t accused of any criminal behavior, and so, as an upstanding citizen, remains on the Sarasota County School Board. (To be honest, we don’t know what positions the Zieglers and their friend preferred.)
Elsewhere in Florida, the Escambia County School District, which is already being sued for its removal of books from school libraries, just keeps on finding new things to censor, The Guardian reported Thursday. Latest on the chopping block, or at least off the library shelves: Reference books, because what if innocent young people look up dirty words or read about gay people or sex stuff in an encyclopedia?
The school says it had no choice but to remove the possibly offending works because Ron DeSantis’s updated “Don’t Say Gay” law, HB 1069, prohibits any student from having access to material that “depicts or describes sexual conduct,” except for sex-ed classes, and then only with parental permission, and possibly while the student wears one of those 19th-century anti-masturbation devices we heard on a podcast were hoaxes anyway but honestly we haven’t bothered to look that up — see why reference works matter?
During the district’s 2023 summer break, officials removed at least eight encyclopedias and five dictionaries.
District officials also removed copies of The Guinness Book of World Records, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not, a book for children that highlights unusual stories and “hair-raising oddities”, according to the book’s description.
Other removed titles include biographies on Thurgood Marshall, the first Black supreme court justice, and Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl.
Sadly, no details on what may have led to the removal of the Guinness or Believe it or Not books; we’ll assume it was something about the enormous genitals of whales, the tiny little weird mushroom dick of Donald Trump, or something like that.
The Guardian story notes that a PEN America press release says more than 1,600 books have been removed from schools across Escambia County, according to a tally by the Florida Freedom to Read Project. The list is in the press release, too, and can you believe the bastards pulled all five books in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy? Also four Black Panther comics collections written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, probably because Wakanda was originally the People’s Republic Of Critical Race Theory. Weirdly, Coates’s prose works, which have been banned elsewhere, aren’t listed here.
But the Guardian bobbled one detail, saying incorrectly that the dictionary removals led to the federal lawsuit against Escambia County Schools, which was in fact filed last May by PEN America, publisher Penguin Random House, several authors of books that were removed, and Florida parents. (The error appears to have originated in a story from The Messenger, for what it’s worth.)
But the Guardian story notes there’s a development in that case, too, hooray:
On Wednesday, a judge ruled that the lawsuit could move forward after finding the suit had standing.
Katie Blankenship, the head of the Florida chapter of PEN America, said in a statement that Escambia County Schools should get its act together and the books “returned to the shelves where they belong, and every day that students are refused access is a day they’re not getting the high-quality education they deserve.”
The school district, for its part, offered a statement fussily explaining that it’s simply not true that there’s any censoring going on, you silly people, even though, yes, the books are not on library shelves:
The 1000+ books they reference have not been banned or removed from the school district; rather, they have simply been pulled for further review to ensure compliance with the new legislation. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous and counterproductive.
See? No banning at all! Maybe the books will be back on the shelves eventually, though possibly not this school year, since so far, the district has only completed reviews of 63 titles. And quite a few of the books being kept now require parental permission to check out.
Look, the librarians and media specialists who would far rather be working with kids and sharing the love of reading have had a lot dumped on their plates. Be patient. They should probably finish reviewing this current tranche of 1000+ books some time before Florida voters get sick of this and vote out DeSantis and his crew of idiots. Maybe.
PREVIOUSLY!
[Guardian / Messenger / PEN America]
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