This article was originally published on April 18, when we were unsure of when a vote on this bill would be happening in the Florida House of Representatives. As of early this week, the vote is scheduled to happen tomorrow, April 24. Today and early tomorrow morning would be our last opportunity to take some kind of action against this bill making it through the House. Whether you’re a Florida resident or not, you can call Florida State Representatives and pressure them to vote “No” on this bill. Posts from the Florida Freedom to Read Project and Gainesville’s own The Lynx Books can help you in figuring out who to call and what to say. Make some calls, and help us defeat this bill today!
A litany of issues faces the state of Florida (as with many other states in the South) right now: climate change rapidly destroying the already failing infrastructure of most of the state’s major cities, the flailing economy, the housing crisis, ongoing environmental degradation from deregulated industrial production, continuing attacks on our communities by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local police, our declining literacy rates, and a mass shooting on Florida State University’s campus. Surprising no one, the Florida state legislature isn’t too concerned about any of that. Instead, they spent hours yesterday in their legislative session debating — you guessed it — book bans again. And this time around, these potential changes could have acutely direct, wide-reaching, and detrimental impacts on the rest of the country.
What Is the Latest Book Ban Bill in Florida?
The new bill, HB 1539, was filed prior to this year’s legislative session by Representative Doug Bankson out of Apopka, a small city of about 59,000 people in Central Florida. Although Florida already leads the nation in the amount of book bans and complaints against books filed, Bankson’s bill attempts to close a supposed “loophole” in the state’s current book ban bill, 2022’s HB 1467. HB 1539 “clarifies” what constitutes “inappropriate material” in books chosen by schools and made available in school libraries and takes away all Florida school districts’ power to make that determination themselves through district representative votes.
In a truly nonsensical statement defending the bill’s “necessity” to the Florida House Education and Employment committee meeting yesterday, Bankson said, “We’re not talking about something that has classical, historic, literary value. We’re talking about if within that there is something we have all agreed that is truly poisonous to the minds of our children.” An extraordinarily absurd statement that features a complete misrepresentation of Scripture was also given by Rep. Taylor Yarkosky of Clermont, another Central Florida city of about 48,000 people. Regarding people fighting against these book bans, he said, “This is pure evil, in my opinion. 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.”
This, of course, brought on a chorus of rejection from Democrats in the Florida legislature, including this response from Rep. Kelly Skidmore of Boca Raton, a South Florida city of about 100,000 people: “We should not be creating law upon law upon law that does demoralize our educators, 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.”
What Will This Book Ban Bill Impact if Passed?
While many of us hate to admit this, it’s true that the GOP is exceedingly organized and prepared to play the long game. As such, the passing of this bill into law helps them attack two different areas of our lives at once: Their hope to destroy the public school system and their wish to continue dismantling our rights to free speech.
HB 1539 provides comprehensive instruction about what should happen if schools and school districts refuse to enforce the policy and remove contested books from their curriculum: The state will simply withhold state funding from those schools. Many of the public schools in the state, particularly those in more low-income areas of our cities, likely couldn’t survive without this funding, and that would create a crisis of impossible proportions for their students and educators. Although this seems more like a problem that would be unique to the state, it’s important to remember that much of what happens in Florida eventually spreads to other state GOP strongholds.
If the bill makes its way beyond the Florida House floor vote to the Senate to Governor Desantis’s desk and becomes a law (which it likely will), the law would present a unique challenge to the Federal precedent known as the Miller Test, a free speech guideline rooted in a 1973 Supreme Court ruling that is used to determine whether materials are actually “obscene” or not. According to the Miller Test, any materials that are deemed “offensive” could not be judged as “obscene” if the work, “taken as a whole,” still has “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” And this sets the stage for Florida to, once again, become a testing and breeding ground for the continued stripping of our rights to use legal precedent to defend our desire to express ourselves as individuals and collectives.
What Are the Potential Implications of This Book Ban Bill Beyond Florida?
As has been the case with previous Supreme Court decisions — such as Roe v. Wade, for instance — there is a possibility that debate over the state’s right to apply and use this law could make its way to their chambers. The law is an affront to free speech and an affront to the abilities of public school districts to decide what is appropriate for their students, and it will likely be challenged in lower courts in the state. Depending on those decisions, the opportunity for the state GOP to file a petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court in order to get the case heard at the Federal level could arise. If we use our knowledge of who is currently on the Supreme Court and the knowledge of their recent decisions as our guide, they would likely welcome the chance to hear this case. The Miller Test was a product of a Supreme Court decision in the case of Miller v. California, so the Court would be in a position to not only overturn the decision entirely but also create their own ruling. In this case, the new ruling would redefine what the Federal government views as “obscene,” and the impact of that ruling would be felt in nearly every facet of our lives from what written materials are published and distributed to what movies are produced and distributed to what people can post on their social media accounts, among many other areas. Essentially, anything — and I truly mean anything — could be deemed “obscene” if they say so, including almost everything you read here on Autostraddle.
It is not a huge leap to assume a law and a Supreme Court ruling like this would be principally applied to marginalized people — particularly queer and trans people — who are merely trying to live their lives. Throughout this nation’s history, we’ve seen this happen in a variety of ways, including through the application of the Comstock Act, which limited the distribution of “obscene” (mostly LGBTQ+) materials through the mail; various state censorship laws, such as the laws in California that threatened to shut down ONE Magazine; and more recently, the Virginia “obscenity” case that targeted Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir (as well as Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Mist and Fury). Even a brief look into the history of queer and trans people in the U.S. will show anyone that these kinds of laws were often used to crack down not just on the distribution of “obscene” materials but on queer and trans people’s ability to connect with other queer and trans people and live their lives in the way that felt most comfortable to them. While the U.S. and state governments often had little power to actually control what queer and trans people did in the privacy of their homes and behind closed doors, this kind of control over what queer and trans people could say and display gave state actors additional ways to limit the rights of these people.
As of today’s committee decision, HB 1539 has been referred to the Florida House scheduling committee to put it on the calendar for a vote. This will likely happen soon since the last day of the regular session is May 2.
If you’re interested in fighting this in any way, you should stay tapped into any news on this coming from the Florida Freedom to Read Project, which has been issuing actionable call outs for people inside and outside of the state regarding these issues for years now.
Read more of Autostraddle’s coverage of book bans
- How to fight ’em.
- Why libraries matter (written by a queer, Floridian librarian).
- LGBTQ fiction sales are up, but we still need to be fighting book bans.
- How Bluestockings in NYC serves queer, trans, and houseless communities amid book bans.
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