For all those who keep insisting that banning a book isn’t really a ban if you can buy it in bookstores, never fear! They’ve gone on to the next step.
Texas, which always fights Florida to lead the cause of book-banning, is now considering a bill to hold businesses liable if they sell a book to a minor that someone considers obscene.
For the average bookstore, the costs – which include court costs and attorneys’ fees – could be astronomical and close their doors forever, even if they win in court.
The ultimate goal, of course, is that the bookstores will stop selling “obscene” books. The legal definition of obscenity doesn’t seem to matter anymore – Susy Creamcheese’s pearl-clutching definition is enough. The banners seem to believe “obscene” involves acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people, or women, or racism, or even students’ rights, so we will soon see Texas bookstores filled with nothing but Chicken Soup books.
Over and over the banners have insisted that if parents want their kids to read those scary books like a children’s biography of Rosa Parks or, you know, the Bible (yes, it gets banned all the time), they can buy it. But not now!
I once devised a short story outline for an underground bookstore, selling the books They don’t want you to read. Please keep it fictional.
In other news:
- A children’s book titled Pride Puppy caught the ire of Maryland parents because it acknowledges the existence of gay people. The case is now up before the Supremes, and Justice Neil Gorsuch seems to believe the fact that one woman wears a leather jacket means it is a children’s book about bondage. It should go without saying (but apparently doesn’t) that of course it’s not about bondage; it’s about a puppy that gets lost at a Pride parade. How scandalous. The book was preemptively pulled from the schools, but the case centers on whether parents can voluntarily excuse their children from learning anything about (checks notes) gay people, Black people, women, or basically anything past the founding fathers, leaving out their annoying habit of enslavement. Whee! Note: I have a leather jacket. Am I a lesbian now?
- I have mixed feelings about this new study by Carnegie Mellon and George Mason University. They studied book circulation data and found out that a) book bans tend to increase the circulation of banned books – a real-life Streisand effect – by 12 percent rather than chilling interest, including readership in states without book bans. In fact, children read banned books 19 percent more than the control titles after a book banning event. That sounds awesome, so why am I hesitant? Because for the authors, that can’t possibly make up for the negative impact of being banned. Children’s authors live and die by school visits and libraries, and when they get tagged as “writing bondage for children,” they lose those bookings. I heard a presentation at AWP once from a woman whose book was challenged because it acknowledged that racism exists, and instantly her bookings dried up by 75 percent, to say nothing of the death threats and doxxing and other extracurricular horrors that came with it. It may be good for library circulation to have a book banned, and we authors like to joke that “please ban my book! I need the sales!” But in reality, it’s anything but a help.
- Is it still book banning when they ban the offices promoting diversity? The Chronicle of Higher Education has been tracking the war on DEI efforts at universities for going on two years now, and it’s rather scary. It details what legislation has been proposed or passed, as well as a university-by-university listing of how they’ve preemptively buried or otherwise responded to calls to end any acknowledgement of diversity. Click here to see their preliminary efforts, compiling the status in just about every state. But how can they have listings in my lovely little Illinois, the sole blue spot in a sea of Midwestern red where we actually outlawed book bans? Northwestern University changed job titles of at least 12 positions to remove DEI references and removed the DEI websites for various colleges and departments. Weasels. They removed the DEI statement from the Pritzker School of Law – yes, named after the family of our crusading governor who is actively calling for disruptive action in the face of (gestures to everything). He’s also probably running for president.
- I was registered for PEN America’s Zoom update on their book ban lawsuit, and sadly I was working and had to miss it. But last week they released a new report detailing more than 4,000 instances of book bans in the first half of the current school year, which is more than the entire 2022-23 school year. In addition to acknowledging the existence of race, LGBTQ and specifically trans people, we can now add any mention of sexual violence and rape, because if you don’t write about a thing and you don’t read about a thing, clearly it isn’t happening or if it did it doesn’t affect you. Surprisingly literally no one, Florida is far and away the “winner” in the book-ban race, but don’t forget Iowa, Texas, Kentucky and Virginia – with an extra credit to Wisconsin, where a single school district banned 444 books following one parent’s complaint. Gloriosky to Suzy Creamcheese.
- A coalition of literary and education organizations have banded together to oppose legislation in … wait for it… Florida, requiring all schools to remove any book within five days of a challenge even if it hasn’t gone through the review process yet. So we’re pretty much giving up the idea that we even evaluate a book’s literary or artistic or political and scientific merit, we just toss any book that anyone objects to (or that an AI chooses, apparently). The coalition includes American Booksellers for Free Expression, Authors Against Book Bans, Authors Guild, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Florida Freedom to Read Project, PEN America, We Need Diverse Books and more.
- The ACLU and Pentagon students are suing DOGE for gutting the IMLS. This impacts the 67,000 children who attend military base schools around the world. The students say their First Amendment rights are being violated, and also AP students are not being taught sex and gender material that may be on their AP exams. The DoD has removed To Kill a Mockingbird, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, A Queer History of the United States and more. What didn’t get removed? Mein Kampf. You really can’t make this stuff up.
- The group suing to remove 14 books from Rockford, Mich. schools lost in court. They were after Kit Runner, All Boys Aren’t Blue, Gender Queer, Fun Home, The Bluest Eye and more of the usual suspects.
- A group of journalism organizations issued a warning to student journalists, changing some of our long-standing advice on student speech. Student media are warned to revisit policies on anonymous sources and takedown requests given the attacks on those whose immigration status may make them targets for lawful speech, such as the student who was deported for writing an op-ed. The group included Associated Collegiate Press, Journalism Education Association, College Media Association, Student Press Law Center and others. Because free speech doesn’t feel so free anymore.
- South Carolina is aiming to fight Texas and Florida for kings of book banning with ten more books added to the list of titles that all schools MUST ban. So much for “community standards.” In a lovely Mobius twist, the head of the South Carolina Department of Education used taxpayer money to hire a lawyer to lobby for this book-banning bill. This is the state where one parent’s complaint got nearly 100 titles removed in Beaufort County. This latest round was opposed by multiple South Carolina groups including ProTruth and Families Against Book Bans, holding a read-in in the lobby, but they went ahead anyway. Four Sarah Maas books are on the list, plus The Perks of Being a Wallflower, All Boys Aren’t Blue, Push… you know, the usual suspects.
- And finally, Book Riot has a nifty list of 15 subversive books to read for the resistance. Not fictional, folks: included is Angela Y. Davis’ If They Come in the Morning on the U.S. prison system, A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit and my favorite title, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook by Sara Ahmed.
That’s about all I can stand to compile this week.