He PEN Club America and one of the largest American publishers, Penguin Random House, presented a demand against a Florida county school system for violating the First Amendment to the Constitution by censoring or restricting certain books from school libraries.
The lawsuit alleges that the school district of Escambia County violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause because the books they collimated were disproportionately written by non-whites and by LGBTQ authors. Also for addressing issues related to race, racism, gender and sexuality.
“Today Escambia County seeks to ban books that critics consider too woke, maintains the lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida. “In the 1970s, schools tried to ban Slaughterhouse-Five and the books edited by Langston Hughes. Tomorrow it could be books about Christianity, about the founders of the country or about war heroes. All of these actions conflict with the First Amendment,” the plaintiffs claim.
The lawsuit comes at a time when many educators and free speech advocates are growing concerned about increasing efforts to ban books from schools and libraries in the United States. Books have become targets in a broader culture war, the newspaper noted. The New York Times.
Whereas in the past it was typically parents who filed complaints against individual titles, current efforts to remove/censor books have been led by a constellation of conservative groups such as Moms for Libertywhich has active structures in most Florida counties.
The group is often national in scope and may run organized campaigns on social media. But new legislation in several states, particularly Florida, where it has been promoted by Gov. Ron DeSantis, has made it easier to challenge and take down books.
In Escambia County, the restrictions to which the lawsuit refers began when Vicki Baggett, a language arts teacher at the district’s Northview High School, contested more than 100 titles last year.
Among them were picture books, young adult novels, and nonfiction works. Among the censored texts appears And Tango Makes Threeabout a two-parent penguin family, challenged for “serving the agenda of an LGBTQ community by using penguins.”
Much of the content of that complaint appeared to have been taken, sometimes literally, from a conservative website called Book Lookswhich contains hundreds of reports on books that the operators of the website find objectionable.
Baggett said he spoke at an Escambia school board meeting last Tuesday. She argued that the district had failed to remove many of the books that she and other stakeholders had deemed inappropriate for students.
“I’ve just been begging them to follow the law and remove books that are obviously inappropriate,” he said.
So far, the school board has voted to remove ten books, some entirely and others from certain grade levels. In each case, the board did so despite a recommendation from a district-level committee of educators, media specialists, community members and parents that the books remain in place.
The district has also changed what happens to the books as the legal challenge unfolds. Traditionally, books stayed on the shelves until after they were appraised and possibly withdrawn.
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Now many of those books are placed in a restricted area that children need parental permission to enter. The lawsuit described that the policy allows for an indefinite restriction of titles and that entering a special area would be a significant obstacle for a child: it could carry, they say, a certain stigma.
Cody Strother, a spokesman for the Escambia school district, said the district could not comment on pending litigation. Two school board members said they could not comment on an active lawsuit.
