A federal judge sided with publishers and authors on Wednesday, ruling that a significant portion of a 2023 Florida legislation that has resulted in books being taken off school library shelves is unconstitutional and excessively broad.
Last year, members of the Orange and Volusia county school boards and the State Board of Education were sued under the First Amendment, and U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza handed down a 50-page ruling. He mainly concentrated on the section of the law that aims to restrict access to reading materials that depict sexual behavior.
“The law does not evaluate the work to determine whether it has any holistic value and does not specify what level of detail describes sexual conduct,” the Orlando-based court wrote.
Mendoza noted that it is unclear what the Act specifically forbids, as the plaintiffs point out. It might prohibit content that claims characters made love or slept together. Maybe not. The defendants make no effort to clarify how the statute ought to operate.
He went on to say that the Florida Department of Education advised teachers to be cautious, which led to the removal of books out of concern that school districts might face consequences.
However, Mendoza noted that even if the regulation is interpreted to exclude references to sexual behavior, any content that contains even one term that is forbidden by the statute must be removed, regardless of its overall significance.
In August 2024, amid statewide controversy around school district choices to restrict access or remove books from library shelves, six publishing corporations, The Authors Guild, five authors, and two parents filed the complaint.
A procedure for parents to object to reading material that portrays or describes sexual conduct or is pornographic was established by the statute (HB 1069). Books that were subject to such objections were to be taken down within five days and kept off the market until the issues were fixed.
The state attorneys fought the complaint by claiming, among other things, that the choice of library books constituted government speech and is therefore exempt from the First Amendment. The removal of library books without taking into account their overall value, however, cannot constitute an expressive action that amounts to government speech, according to Mendoza, who rejected that claim on Wednesday.
Mendoza noted that a general content-based ban on materials, as opposed to one based on personalized curation, scarcely conveys any deliberate government message at all. Labeling book deletions as government speech simply works to silence the opposing views.
The judge also mentioned how decisions to remove books are influenced by parental opposition.
He stated, largely paraphrasing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, “Parents have the right to guide their children’s upbringing and education, but the government cannot repackage their speech and pass it off as its own.”
Mendoza also agreed that the term “pornographic” should be interpreted as meaning “harmful to minors” under Florida law.
Numerous works, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, were taken off library shelves, according to the lawsuit. For their novels and other works, those two authors received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The authors Julia Alvarez, John Green, Laurie Halse Anderson, Jodi Picoult, and Angie Thomas; the publishing houses Penguin Random House LLC, Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers LLC, Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC, Simon & Schuster, LLC, and Sourcebooks LLC; the authors’ guild; and the parents Heidi Kellogg and Judith Anne Hayes are the plaintiffs in this case.
Jim Saunders, Florida News Service
The decision:
