That book is banned, comrade
MAGA Floridians fear ideas they find mildly threatening. Heads are not rolling yet, but it’s open season on books. At the slightest objection — outrage-addicted MAGAs are drunk on the power of it — Florida is removing books from its schools.
A new measure in the Florida legislature would allow any person raising any objection to any book to disappear it as quickly as an East German neighbor turned over to Stasi.
Greg Sargent writes that while the bill seems to have support from Republican presidential hopeful Gov. Ron DeSantis, passage could backfire:
“If Florida passes this bill, it may be the first state in the country to institute in every public school a rule requiring the immediate removal of materials following an objection,” Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist who closely tracks these proposals, told me. “For activists on the right, this is a new strategy that will greatly speed the process of censoring materials.”
Lawmakers wrote the provision into a bill expanding the state’s “don’t say gay” law, It expands the prohibition on classroom discussion of sex and gender from third grade up to high school. But this section, Sargent writes, mandates that books containing material deemed “sexual” or “pornographic” (in the eye of a citizen censor) be “unavailable to students until the objection is resolved.” Any resident of the county could strip books from school shelves on a whim. Or a rumor.
The bill’s sponsor harbors no reservations:
The bill’s chief sponsor, Republican state Sen. Clay Yarborough, doesn’t deny this. He holds it up as a positive. In a statement emailed to me, Yarborough cited the bill’s targeting of sexual material and said he will always “err on the side of protecting children.”
“I do not have any concerns with the materials being removed until an objection is resolved,” Yarborough added.
Be the first on your block to inform on a book! It’s not exactly the Order of Lenin, but perhaps a Florida Man version is coming.
If the new bill passes, it would become statewide policy that this book — or others with similarly peripheral “sexual conduct” — must be banned from a given district’s schools immediately upon the objection of one resident of that county, says Kara Gross, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.
“It grants enormous power to a single bigoted individual to dictate and control what books other parents’ kids have access to,” Gross told me.
Sachs is sure that “the automatic removal provision will be abused and lead to widespread censorship.”
Of course, it will. The MAGA movement is filled with people feeling disempowered by demographic shifts weakening traditional white-Christian social dominance. What better way to earn their loyalty by granting them a unilateral veto over what others may read?
Sargent adds:
Right-wing activists in Florida are already lodging objections on vaguely sexual grounds to an extraordinary range of books, as the Popular Information newsletter demonstrated. In some cases, dozens of books are getting banned in counties because of the objections of one parent, as happened when a member of the right-wing “Moms for Liberty” orchestrated the removal of 20 Jodi Picoult novels from school libraries in Martin County.
It may win DeSantis some primary votes, Sargent believes, but backfire with elites hoping he can “win back suburban voters alienated by Trump.”
So, DeSantis can keep incentivizing these self-deputized local book-purging czars to go on their rampages if he must. Yet it’s likely he will have to answer for the whims of these petty functionaries when their efforts run off the rails.
Soon in DeSantisland you’ll need a permission slip to check out books.