Florida Politics
Representatives have advanced to the floor legislation that sponsors say will plug loopholes that allow pornography in schools. Critics, meanwhile, believe the bill will expand book bans.
The House Education & Employment Committee approved a bill (HB 1539) that would revise a law on challenging books that are “harmful to minors” regardless of whether they hold literary value.
That could challenge the application of the Miller Test, a free speech standard rooted in a 1973 Supreme Court ruling. A landmark decision written by former Chief Justice Warren Burger allowed for censorship of obscene materials that violate community standards, but includes in any evaluation whether a work as a whole contains “literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”
Rep. Doug Bankson, an Apopka Republican, said that framework has allowed some books with inappropriate content to remain on bookshelves even as Florida has tried to remove pornographic works from schools.
“We’re not talking about something that has classical, historic, literary value,” Bankson said. “We’re talking about if within that there is something we have all agreed that is truly poisonous to the minds of our children.”
But Democrats on the committee said the legislation would advance an already embarrassing policy of book banning in Florida’s schools. PEN America already reports that Florida leads the nation in yanking books off school shelves, accounting for 73% of all book banning incidents in the country in the second half of 2023.
“We should not be creating law upon law upon law that does demoralize our educators,” said Rep. Kelly Skidmore, a Boca Raton Democrat. “That does make it difficult for them to make any decision about how to teach a child a difficult subject. Should 10-year-olds be reading what my mom would have called smut? No, and no teacher and no librarian is pushing that on them.”
Some activists speaking at the meeting disagreed. Julie Gebhards, a Tampa mother who has spoken against certain books at local schools, brought a copy of “Identical,” a young adult novel by Ellen Hopkins. Gebhards’ copy was brimming with stickered notes to mark pages with sexually explicit passages. She then showed a copy of “Blankets,” a celebrated graphic novel that includes nudity and a sex scene.
Critics say the legislation sends Florida further down the road of censoring material in schools and restricting access to important work with different political views about sexual orientation and gender identity.
Quinn Diaz of Equality Florida said the legislation would create a “dangerous erosion of constitutional standards that could drastically increase book bannings in Florida’s classrooms.” Diaz said Florida had banned 4,500 books last year alone, and suggested that the state does not need more material taken away.
“This bill seeks to address a topic that is exhaustively covered by state law, but in doing so, would reject a long-standing Supreme Court standard to prohibit consideration of a material’s serious literary and scientific value, lowering the threshold for obscenity determinations,” Diaz said.
But GOP lawmakers said the problem was not how many books were banned, but that the need was there at all. Rep. Taylor Yarkosky characterized the battle against pornography as one for the next generation’s very souls.
“This is pure evil, in my opinion,” Yarkosky said of the books in question.
“And they get up there and say all these comments and all these explanations. Well, they’re distortions and distractions from what is really going on. The Bible says in First Corinthians that God is not the author of confusion, but of peace. And nothing that they’re saying is peaceful or clarity. It is confusing calamity, chaos and discontentment to the 10th power, which, by biblical definition, is evil.”
House advances effort to ban books deemed pornographic regardless of literary value
