The Battle In The Escambia County School Library

In a curiously blind assertion, Michelle Goldberg offers the right condemnation.

What I find most fascinating about the lawsuit, though, is the glimpse it offers into how national and state-level political dynamics empower the most fanatical members of a community to impose their will on everyone else.

True words, though the truth runs the gamut from deciding that “Gender Queer” is an appropriate book for a junior high library to demanding the removal of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

Meanwhile, Baggett expanded her crusade, preparing a list of 116 books she wanted removed from school libraries, including “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, “The House of Spirits” by Isabel Allende, and, in elementary schools, “Draw Me a Star” by Eric Carle, author of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” because it has a picture of a naked man and woman. “When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball,” a book about how the famous Black sprinter overcame polio to win gold at the Olympics, made the list for its descriptions of the racism Rudolph faced as a child in segregated Tennessee. Baggett, who told the journalist Judd Legum that she’s a member of the neo-Confederate group Daughters of the Confederacy, accused the book of “race-baiting.”

If you didn’t read your infant children “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” chances are very high that you sucked as a parent. But one person, empowered by Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, decided which books met her personal sense of propriety and demanded all else be removed.

Much of the impetus for book restrictions in Escambia came from one person — a high school English teacher named Vicki Baggett. Last May, Baggett went after “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” a young adult coming-of-age novel published in 1999, which high school students could choose to read for a class assignment. She cited, among other things, the book’s “extreme sexual content descriptions.”

Another person, this one a PTA mom, decided to fight against Baggett’s effort to ban books.

Durtschi is part of a groundbreaking lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, against the Escambia County School District and Escambia County School Board for their sweeping school library censorship. In addition to Durtschi and another Escambia County parent, the plaintiffs include the free expression organization PEN America, Penguin Random House and a group of authors of children’s and young adult books. The suit seeks to have Escambia’s book restrictions declared unconstitutional for targeting specific viewpoints and for infringing on the rights of students to receive information. Given the frenzy of book bans we’re now seeing nationwide — The Washington Post reported that in several states, librarians can be sent to prison for giving kids the wrong books — the outcome will have national implications.

The problem is not that librarians will actually to go prison, although it’s not outside the question whether that can happen, but the chilling effect on the availability of books in a school library. While PEN America and Penguin Random House and book authors certainly have an important interest at stake, they likely have no standing to challenge what the Escambia County School Board or school librarian decides to put on its shelves. Or decides to remove from its shelves. And it may yet be an open question whether a parent who argues that the district is engaged in censorship has a controversy given they can go to the public library or buy the book herself if she wants her child to read it.

But that’s not the point, really. The point is that no one knows which books some flaming nutjob will decide is the work of the devil and destroying young minds and souls. No one knows what school librarians will decide when confronted with angry parents and the threat of being fired or prosecuted for picking, or not picking, the “right” book.

The local school board’s actions, said Suzanne Nossel, the head of PEN America, are “an emblematic and egregious example of the pattern that we’ve been documenting across the country as far as an escalation in book removals and targeting of specific narratives involving people of color and L.G.B.T.Q. authors and stories.”

It is both emblematic and egregious. With the force of law to strike fear into the hearts of librarians, teachers, administrators and school board members, actual censorship, if not its more insidious cousin, the chilling effect, is being used by fanatics on the right to sanitize school libraries from books with the most tenuous connection to anything objectionable. Eric Carle, for crying out loud? Just as students should be exposed to ideas that broaden their horizons and challenge their views when it comes to cancel culture, the cancellation of books has no more merit.

Granted, kids can watch porn to their heart’s content on the internet, so it’s not as if they can be shielded from the sorts of things many parents, who are hardly supporters of book banning, believe are inappropriate for public school students. Teen Vogue’s article about the correct way to engage in anal sex comes to mind. But internet porn does not have the imprimatur of approval of a middle school librarian. When library shelves become a battle ground between ideologies, Newton’s Third Law should be anticipated to come into play.

I strongly oppose the banning of book and the efforts to impose censorship on any library. At the same time, some have chosen to make this the battleground by failing to exercise reasonable judgment as to what belongs on these shelves. As Goldberg pointed out, “political dynamics empower the most fanatical members of a community to impose their will on everyone else.” This is a two way street, and if one travels down the road in one direction, don’t be surprised to find out that others will travel in the opposite direction.