Book bans are nothing new. In 1637, the Puritan government banned Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan. The government believed the book was heretical and criticized Puritan’s beliefs. This gave Thomas Morton the honor of being the first author to have a book banned in the United States. But he wasn’t the first author to have a book banned. Savonarola, a religious fanatic in Florence, burned copies of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria in 1497. US Customs later banned the book in 1928. The Roman Catholic Church created the first list of unacceptable books, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, in 1559, which was kept updated until 1966. Banned works included Dante’s Boethius and Dante, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Conservatively religious people continue to support banning books in public spaces. Specifically books that don’t agree with their worldview. In 1973, the school board in Drake, North Dakota, burned copies of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Deliverance by James Dickey. The reason was that the books had profanity and references to homosexuality. Alabama banned The Diary of Anne Frank for references to sexuality. Historically, religious groups oppose education about gender or sex outside of marriage. The belief itself is not the point of this post. The issue is their insistence that everyone live by their standards.
In recent years, this belief has spilled into politics by creating laws to ban books from classrooms and libraries. Florida passed the Parental Rights in Education law. The law criminalizes lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity. Violation of the law is a third-degree felony and punishable by five years in prison. This law resulted in schools removing all books that reference the LGBTQ+ community. Effectively banning these books.
The Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop Woke) Act made it illegal to teach that minorities suffered oppression or discrimination. Because of this law, parents have successfully had books banned that discuss racism, sexism, gender, and national origins. For a list of books banned in Florida in 2023, see Pen America. In Duval County, they banned 176 books before the starts of the 2023-2024 school year, most by minority authors.
Both laws require schools to hire teams of people to evaluate the books used in schools and to process requests from parents to ban books. In addition, there is the added cost of needing to purchase new curriculums and books which meet the new standards of education in Florida. The long-term cost is that students can no longer receive AP or college credits for some classes. The required changes to the curriculum mean the classes no longer meet national standards.
Texas passed a law that requires all book sellers to rate books. The law requires book sellers to read every book they sell and rate them to determine if they are appropriate for children. The law bans any non-compliant booksellers from government contracts or providing books to schools. Book sellers are suing the state of the Texas claiming the law violates the first and fourteenth amendments by regulating speech.
In Llano County, Texas, the commissioners removed multiple books from the public library. A judge later overturned the commissioner and ordered the books returned. This was in part because the judge determined commissioners were discriminatory in choosing what books to remove. In Houston, the school district closed the school libraries and turned them into computer labs and detention facilities.
With Texas banning 800 books, schools are spending thousands of dollars trying to comply. This is because the Texas law mirrors the Florida one and requires the removal of any books that make students feel uncomfortable. According to one estimate, which uses the lowest known amount reported as a base, evaluating the books would cost $1,562,600. That doesn’t consider that some districts have millions of books, which would cost more to evaluate, or the cost of the lawsuits to fight the bans.
Book bans cause more damage than help. They drain funds from education budgets and waste time trying to force everyone to abide by their narrow world view.