Book Ban: Last News

By Ellise Shafer

attached several conservative amendments targeting access to abortion and LGBTQ rights to the National Defense Authorization Act.Among those amendments were a measure to prohibit the health insurance program for active-duty service members and their dependents, and a program that covers military dependents who have special needs, from covering the cost of gender-affirming treatments, including hormones and surgical interventions.Another anti-LGBTQ amendment, introduced by U.S. Rep.

expanded “Don’t Say Gay” law.Charlotte County Schools Superintendent Mark Vianello and Michael McKinley, the attorney for the Charlotte County Schools, recently responded to questions from the district’s librarians at a July meeting asking whether the law required the removal of books with LGBTQ characters but contained no explicit sex scenes.“Books with LBGTQ+ characters are not to be included in classroom libraries or school library media centers,” Vianello and McKinley said in response, according to a district memo obtained under a public information request by the Florida Freedom to Read Project.The nonprofit group, which opposes the law’s provisions making it easier to challenge or remove books from schools, provided the memo to The Associated Press last week.After receiving negative press, the district backed off slightly from an across-the-board ban, clarifying that it primarily applied to elementary and middle schools.The district said that high school libraries could keep non-explicit books with LGBTQ characters and themes in their collections, but could not use any of those books in classroom instruction, according to the investigative journalism website Popular Information.The expansion of the “Parental Rights in Education” law — dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law by critics — passed earlier this year after conservatives said the original 2022 law didn’t go far enough in stopping LGBTQ-themed materials from being accessed by minors.Under the new restrictions, the ban on LGBTQ content was applied to all grades — except in rare instances for some high school biology or health classes.The law also allows any county resident — regardless of whether they have children enrolled in school — to demand the removal of books

A Catholic school outside of Kansas City, Missouri, has expelled a straight-A student after his mother opposed the school’s LGBTQ book ban. As first reported by the Kansas City Star, St.

its ban on a children’s book based on a true story about a male penguin couple that adopted an egg and raised the chick that hatched from it. Censors had flagged the book for violating the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.Lake County Schools and officials with the Florida Department of Education subsequently asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit, brought by the authors of And Tango Makes Three and the parents of five school-age children, who alleged that the ban infringed on their First Amendment rights.According to Popular Information, the book was removed from library shelves because the penguin couple was the same sex.

Mississippi minors are being denied access to widely used e-book and audiobook platforms due to a new book-banning law.The law, which went into effect at the beginning of July, purportedly intends to protect minors from digital resources and databases that contain “sexually oriented” materials.The impact? Because OverDrive, Hoopla, and Mississippi state libraries lack age-based content restrictions, some public libraries are making their online databases –- including those entirely lacking in sexual content — entirely inaccessible to all young people under the age of 18, including disabled minors who may depend on audiobook or e-book access to read.“This move by the state ensures that those with the least privileges — those in unstable homes, those without regular internet access, and those without active parents or guardians in their lives — have even fewer opportunities to utilize public goods and services,” Kelly Jensen, the editor of Book Riot, the largest independent editorial book site, wrote in analyzing the ban.Given how existing Mississippi law defines “sexually oriented” materials, vendors could potentially be deemed to be violating the law by providing access to materials depicting sexual reproduction, nudity or displays of human anatomy, sexual health information, or depictions of LGBTQ identity. Depictions of any of these topics would be treated as equivalent to providing access to hardcore pornography.Violators of the law can face fines between $500 and $5,000, as well as possible prison time.