Six major book publishers have teamed up to sue the US state of Florida over an “unconstitutional” law that has seen hundreds of titles purged from school libraries following rightwing challenges.
The landmark action targets the “sweeping book removal provisions” of House Bill 1069, which required school districts to set up a mechanism for parents to object to anything they considered pornographic or inappropriate.
A central plank of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke” on Florida campuses, the law has been abused by rightwing activists who quickly realized that any book they challenged had to be immediately removed and replaced only after the exhaustion of a lengthy and cumbersome review process, if at all, the publishers say.
Since it went into effect last July, countless titles have been removed from elementary, middle and high school libraries, including American classics such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.
Contemporary novels by bestselling authors such as Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume and Stephen King have also been removed, as well as The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank’s gripping account of the Holocaust, according to the publishers.
“Florida HB 1069’s complex and overbroad provisions have created chaos and turmoil across the state, resulting in thousands of historic and modern classics, works we are proud to publish, being unlawfully labeled obscene and removed from shelves,” Dan Novack, vice-president and associate general counsel of Penguin Random House (PRH), said in a statement.
“Students need access to books that reflect a wide range of human experiences to learn and grow. It’s imperative for the education of our young people that teachers and librarians be allowed to use their professional expertise to match our authors’ books to the right reader at the right time in their life.”
PRH is joined in the action by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster and Sourcebooks. The 94-page lawsuit, which also features as plaintiffs the Authors Guild and a number of individual writers, was filed in federal court in Orlando on Thursday.
The suit contends that the book removal provisions violate previous supreme court decisions relating to reviewing works for their literary, artistic, political, and scientific value as a whole while considering any potential obscenity; and seeks to restore the discretion “of trained educators to evaluate books holistically to avoid harm to students who will otherwise lose access to a wide range of viewpoints”.
“Book bans censor authors’ voices, negating and silencing their lived experience and stories,” Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of the Authors Guild, said in the statement.
“These bans have a chilling effect on what authors write about, and they damage authors’ reputations by creating the false notion that there is something unseemly about their books.
“Yet these same books have edified young people for decades, expanding worlds and fostering self-esteem and empathy for others. We all lose out when authors’ truths are censored.”
Separate from the publishers’ action, a group of three parents filed their own lawsuit in June, insisting that the law discriminates against parents who oppose book bans and censorship because it allows others to dictate what their children can and cannot read.
Sydney Booker, a spokesperson for the Florida education department, called the publishers’ lawsuit “a stunt” in an email to The Hill, and claimed “there are no books banned in Florida. Sexually explicit material and instruction are not suitable for schools.”
DeSantis has attempted to portray the issue as “a hoax”, arguing that because the state has empowered parents to make objections, and is not directly making the challenges itself, it is not responsible for books subsequently removed from shelves.
He did concede, however, that “bad actors”, such as the far-right Moms for Liberty group, had filed “frivolous challenges” that were swamping school districts, and took steps to limit the number that could be made.
The education department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.
