Book bans in the USA: Major publishers sue Florida

America is considered the land of the free, and Florida has always held “freedom” in high regard. But under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, various laws have been passed in recent years that restrict the freedoms guaranteed by the constitution. They are also leading to more and more books being removed from school libraries because of “offensive content.” Now six major publishers have filed suit against the school authorities in Florida over these “book bans.”

A 2023 law will require that a book be removed from a school library within five days as a precautionary measure if a single parent of a student or even a single citizen of the district finds the work inappropriate. “Inappropriate” specifically means that the book addresses art topics that are not age-appropriate, such as sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or “race.”

Teachers face draconian punishments

The publishers explain in their lawsuit that they are not against the law in principle and are striving to protect students from pornography. But in their view, the law's vague wording leaves the door wide open to arbitrariness. In fact, book bans in Florida are on the rise. According to the writers' association Pen America, 3,135 books were published from libraries in Florida between July 2021 and December 2023. However, censorship is not limited to Florida; the Sunshine State is leading in this regard, but within six months, more than 4,300 books were banned in a total of 23 states across the USA.

In their fight against this censorship fury, publishers are invoking freedom of expression, but also a ruling by the Supreme Court. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that when deciding whether a work is pornographic, it is not a single passage that is decisive, but the work as a whole. However, that is precisely what does not happen in the censorship process. The school board has the offending passage read out loud, after which it then removes the work from the library as a precaution. It can take years until a final decision is made.

As a result of this procedure, the plaintiffs' works of world literature repeatedly fell victim to censorship, for example by Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Aldous Huxley, Leo Tolstoy, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway and Alice Walker. The famous Holocaust comic “Maus” by Art Spiegelman also had to be removed from a library in Tennessee. All censored books can be found and purchased from online booksellers.

Over the past two years, seven conservative states have passed laws that impose heavy fines and long prison sentences on librarians and teachers who give children “harmful” books to read.

In Georgia, a teacher was fired for reading a book about gender identity to fifth-graders. In Texas, a teacher was thrown out of the street for reading Anne Frank's diary to her eighth-grader.

Most of the time, LGBTQ content is taken into account

Such cases have a deterrent effect on other teachers and school officials. They often now preemptively “clean” their curricula and libraries of works that could get them into trouble. The lawsuit even mentions schools that have closed their libraries entirely as a precaution. Because no work is safe from the moral guardians. In Utah last year, even the Bible was the object of objections because of violent and obscene passages.

Often it is a few supervisors who tyrannize schools. The Washington Post analyzed a thousand languages ​​and found that 60 percent of the complaints came from eleven people.

Books with LGBTQ content were particularly accused of being pornographic and indoctrinated. Other laws in Florida prohibit same-sex sexuality from being discussed in elementary school classes or exposing minors to general “sexual descriptions or narratives.” This also makes reading books with “suggestive” content a criminal offense. In this climate, teachers quickly expose themselves to suspicion of sexualizing children with abusive intent (so-called “grooming”).

Another point of contention is the way in which African-American history is taught. In Florida in particular, teachers are often accused of being too left-wing and influenced by “critical race theory”; accordingly, they present the legacy of slavery and racism in a one-sided way, with whites as perpetrators and blacks as victims, thereby instilling feelings of guilt in white students.

The freedom they mean

A driving force behind the book bans in Florida is Governor Ron DeSantis. He often speaks of the widespread “woke” indoctrination in schools. Pornographic and inappropriate material was smuggled into classrooms and libraries in order to sexualize students.

After the publisher filed a lawsuit, his staff stated that the state Department of Education was not banning any books and that the claims about a book ban were a “hoax.” The law simply gave parents and citizens the opportunity to check and complain about their children's school materials. DeSantis had long been successful with this type of conservative cultural policy in Florida and used it to position himself as a presidential candidate in the Republican primaries. However, he had no chance against the favorite Trump.

Even in Florida itself, resistance against him is now growing. In addition to the lawsuit filed by the major publishers – which include industry giants such as Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster and Harper Collins – other objections are also pending from the writers' associations Pen America and Authors Guild. In other states such as Texas and Iowa, federal courts are considering similar lawsuits. It is ironic that conservatives like DeSantis like to refer to freedom of speech in the First Amendment to the Constitution to fight against demands for political correctness. Now DeSantis, who titled his autobiography “The Courage to Be Free”, suddenly has the reputation of being an opponent of freedom himself.

The current debate about “dangerous” books is part of a general battle over the quintessentially American concept of freedom, which has so far been championed primarily by Republicans. But now “freedom” has also become a central slogan in Kamala Harris' election campaign.

The Democrats understand freedom above all to mean protection from state interference when it comes to private matters such as one's love life, the right to abortion or the choice of reading material. It is quite possible that this will appeal to many conservative citizens who feel that the paternalism in states such as Florida goes too far.