August 12, 2024, 10:28am

It’s a bad time to be a spicy book in a school library in America, or at least in Republican-controlled states. Last week, government officials in Utah and Iowa, having learned no lessons from Tipper Gore’s crusade against explicit language in music and generally being spineless sycophants more interested in scoring political points with reactionary conservatives than the actual education of children, have in the past week moved to ban swaths of books—fiction, poetry, non-fiction, you name it—under the guise of ‘keeping pornography out of children’s hands.’

First, in Utah, H.B. 29 went into effect and thirteen titles were immediately banned from classrooms and libraries, including the entirety of Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series as well as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (I don’t recall this being particularly sexy, although there are those naked blue guys) and Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey (honestly, what). The law requires public schools to pull books if they are “banned in either three districts, or two school districts and five charter schools” and we can be certain that the list is going to rapidly expand beyond these initial thirteen books. 

Not to be outdone, a federal appeals court put Iowa’s Senate File 496 into immediate effect, requiring schools to remove any texts (excepting religious ones, because they aren’t even trying to hide the theocracy thing now) that ‘describe sexual acts.’ The law also prohibits instruction about sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity before the seventh grade. The Iowa law was originally passed in 2023 but blocked last December by a federal judge who suggested that the vagueness of the law could allow for the mass removal of books—perhaps because he looked at this report from PEN and the Des Moines Register and saw that nearly 3,400 titles had been banned in the first six months of the law going into effect.

Idaho, Tennessee, and South Carolina have also moved to put restrictions on the titles available to young people—Idaho’s law is particularly punitive towards libraries, in that it allows someone who complains about a book’s presence on the shelves to seek monetary damages of up to $250 if the book hasn’t been relocated to an “adult’s only” section within 60 days.

Putting aside my general feelings about the need to update English curricula for students (some of the canon is just lost on teenagers, no matter how great, and being forced to read something can turn a student into a life-long enemy of literature—heck, just ask some of the government officials voting in favor of these bans), the irony of banning The Handmaid’s Tale on account of the book’s description of sexual activity while allowing religious texts to go unquestioned is as painful to see as it ever has been. Banning books like 1984 and Brave New World and Maus continues to show in plainest terms that the people in power are terrified of stories that might—might!—encourage a bit of divergent thinking amongst their audiences.

More than that, preventing children from exploring the world through literature will unquestionably diminish their lived experiences. I would not trade, for the whole wide world, my own moments of sexual awakening or even just burgeoning physical awareness that happened as a result of reading books that I’m certain will end up on banned lists in these states. Instead of running away from it or trying to hide it under the rug, we should be encouraging kids to, say, read The Eyes of the Dragon and then ask their teachers or parents or government officials about the early scene that includes a line about the king’s flaccid penis. Who knows, everybody might learn something useful along the way.