Yup, Florida school board bans a book about banning books

The headline that made its way around the world last week looked like a joke:

“Florida school board bans book about book bans”

The story couldn’t have been more meta. Or more Florida. I half-hoped it was satire, but having covered this state’s increasingly ridiculous education priorities in recent years, knew it wasn’t.

The Tallahassee Democrat explained that the Indian River County School Board voted 3-to-2 to ban a book called “Ban This Book.”

The book is a lighthearted yet poignant tale about a 9-year-old girl named Amy Anne Ollinger who, upon learning that her school is trying to censor books, decides to fight back by cultivating her own secret library in her school locker. It’s part comedy and part thought-provoker. Some of the book focuses on how Amy Anne doesn’t always go about things the right way.

A promotional blurb for the book says: “Ban This Book is a love letter to the written word and its power to give kids a voice.” Publishers Weekly said it celebrates “kids’ power to effect change.”

Well, in Indian River County, that kind of thing would not be tolerated.

One school board member described it as “liberal Marxist propaganda,” bolstering my belief that most people who use the word “Marxist” don’t have the foggiest clue what it means … and should probably read more books themselves.

To that end, I have a new proposal for Florida’s book-banners: Before pushing to censor any book, you have to first actually read it and then prove you understood it. In this case, “Ban This Book” was written for 8-to-12-year-olds. So you might need to put on your thinking cap.

The story in Indian River revealed that virtually all the censorship stemmed from one person — a Mom for (so-called) Liberty who objected to books by everyone from Toni Morrison to Kurt Vonnegut.

“She also got ‘Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation’ pulled from a high school,” the story said. “And, in response to her objection to a children’s book that showed the bare behind of a goblin, the school district drew clothes over it.”

OK, let’s stop here. If you’re a grown adult whose crowning accomplishments are to censor a book about the Holocaust, ban a book on book-banning and draw cartoon underpants on a cartoon goblin, then to paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy: You might be an idiot.

So this is my plea today to my fellow Floridians during an election year: Stop electing idiots. Specifically, stop electing them to school boards.

Florida ranks 46th in SAT scores in America, behind states like South Carolina and Georgia.

Unless we’re competing to see which state has more Confederate cemeteries or shrimp-and-grits recipes, we should never trail South Carolina and Georgia.

Florida’s SAT scores even trail places where a larger percentage of students take the test, like the District of Columbia, where 100% of students take it.

This is not surprising if you focus more on censoring books than reading them.

Here in Central Florida, most school officials stay focused on things like math, science and promoting reading rather than restricting it. But there are outliers.

In Orange County, Moms for (limiting) Liberty member Alicia Farrant has crusaded against a number of books, including the award-winning young-adult novel “Looking for Alaska” by Orlando-raised author John Green.

I read the book Farrant wanted to censor last year and then asked her if she had done the same. She did not answer that question.

While reading, I found a few pages describing awkward sexual encounters between teens — sandwiched between hundreds of pages about comparative religion, childhood poverty, teenage anxiety and U.S. history.

As Green himself told me: “Pornography is designed to be titillating. Unless you get hot and bothered reading stories about grief and guilt and radical hope, I think it is very difficult indeed to construct the novel as pornographic.”

He’s right. In fact, that’s what led me to my proposal for all those eager to ban, censor or restrict books. Anyone who wants to do so should first sign a sworn statement that says they’ve actually read the literature they want to censor and then provide a short description of what they think the book is truly about.

Why? Because it’s easy to take a selected passage out of context.

I could go to a school board meeting and read a few lines from the Book of Ezekiel that describe a woman who pined to have her “breasts fondled” by men with “genitals like those of donkeys.”

Of course it would sound inappropriate. Yet what would really be inappropriate would be if I suggested that one lewd passage (which is actually an anecdote) represented the Bible as a whole — and then tried to use that one passage to ban the Bible. Then I’d be the idiot.

The Moms (who don’t really understand) Liberty have every right to prohibit their own children from consuming literature they think their kids are incapable of maturely processing. Not to block access to everyone else’s kids as well.

And don’t let anyone drag you into dumb debates about whether books are really “banned,” since they’re still sold at bookstores. Nobody said otherwise. If a school district bans guns, drugs, vape sticks or anything else, we all say the district “banned” those things. Everyone knows this. People argue semantics when they can’t argue anything better.

Also, watch out for bogus claims that all these censorship crusades are about targeting books that “sexualize children.” Baloney. These folks have targeted everything from silly books like “Captain Underpants” to serious books by Zora Neale Hurston.

There have been a handful of books on school shelves that never should’ve been there. But most disappeared after parents or teachers complained using book-flagging systems that were in place long before the Moms for (selective) Liberty came around.

The book-banners fume about a fever-dream world where every kindergartner is being force-fed porn. The actual casualties of these censorship crusaders are Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy and Flannery O’Connor.

the embarrassing headlines: “Tolstoy, Sendak picture book among hundreds banned from Florida schools.”

I think the vast majority of Floridians are sick of these embarrassing, anti-intellectual, anti-education headlines. If you’re among them, vote accordingly this fall.

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