Florida students might be on summer break, but that hasn’t stopped the state’s top education officials from forcing school districts to remove library books from their shelves ― and threatening school employees with prosecution if they don’t.
After the board members of the Florida Department of Education interrogated a school district superintendent earlier this month about books the board didn’t approve of and claimed the district’s librarians were child abusers, other Florida schools rushed to remove the books in question prompting a fresh wave of book bans.
At that same meeting, the state board referred to a list of books that they had deemed to be “pornographic.” The more than 50 titles include novels by Judy Blume and George R.R. Martin, and a memoir by Jaycee Lee Duggard, a woman who had been kidnapped as a child and held captive for nearly 20 years.
“If you concede here and take their word that these 50 books are pornography, then you’ve allowed them to give orders about anything,” Stephana Farrell, the co-director of the Florida Freedom to Read Project, told HuffPost.
Florida has been on the forefront of the movement to ban books since the right-wing groups began organizing around parental rights. Under the guise of protecting children, conservative activists began taking over school boards, smearing teachers as indoctrinators, and objecting to books with LGBTQ+ content. For two school years in a row, the state has released a list of hundreds of books that officials deemed inappropriate.
