6 major book publishers file lawsuit against Florida education officials over alleged book bans
Six major book publishers in the United States filed a lawsuit against Florida officials last week, alleging that moves to remove explicit books from the state's public school libraries violate the First Amendment.
The lawsuit was filed last Thursday in Orlando by Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers and Sourcebooks.
The plaintiffs include authors Julia Alvarez, Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, Jodi Picoult and Angie Thomas, as well as two students and two parents.
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The defendants include officials on the Florida State Board of Education, Orange County School Board and Volusia County School Board.
The complaint takes issue with House Bill 1069, which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law in 2023 and led to hundreds of books being removed from public school libraries in the state.
Authors whose books are affected range from Maya Angelou and Judy Blume to Aldous Huxley and Charles Dickens, according to a press release from HarperCollins.
Other titles include Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five.
One mechanism by which public schools must "discontinue use of the material" in libraries under the law includes those that prompt school boards to stop parents from reading their content aloud during school board meetings, as noted by The Washington Post.
The state government of Florida doesn't decide which books remain in public school libraries and allows schools to make that decision, though advocates of free speech allege that DeSantis and Florida lawmakers have passed legislation that has effectively restricted the number of books in schools, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
Nathalia Medina, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Education, pushed back against the lawsuit's claims in a statement to WaPo.
"There are no books banned in Florida," Medina said. "Sexually explicit material and instruction are not suitable for schools."
The suit asserts that its intention is not to prevent school libraries from banning obscene books, but the publishers do take issue with part of the law that prohibits content on the basis of allegedly overbroad definitions of "pornographic" and "sexual content."
Judith Anne Hayes, who is one of the parents named in the suit and is the mother of a student in Orange County, said she was upset that her child wasn't able to read books such as Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, and suggested that such titles "have been falsely branded as 'pornographic' or otherwise inappropriate."
Author Stephen King, who claims 23 of his books were booted from Florida school libraries because of their content, tweeted a vulgar statement against the law over the weekend.
"Florida has banned 23 pf [sic] my books," King wrote. "What the [expletive]?"
Stephana Ferrell, who works with the book access advocacy organization Florida Freedom to Read Project, suggested that King might have been referring to the approximate number of titles that have been removed pending review in Escambia County in Florida's westernmost tip, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
Jon Brown is a reporter for The Christian Post. Send news tips to [email protected]
