The government doesn’t need to solve everything.
It’s no secret that in the U.S., certain books have contents considered too hazardous for children. Conservative states such as Florida, Texas, and Iowa have opted to ban books depicting gender identity and sexual orientation to children
However, legal challenges have questioned the constitutionality of those decisions.
Senate File 496 had mandated that for grades K-12 in Iowa, any books that contain sex or anything close to a sexual act are to be banned from those schools. The bill also banned the education of gender identity or sexual orientation. The law was supposed to go into effect in July 2023, however, the ACLU of Iowa and the Lambda Legal Defense Educational Fund filed a federal lawsuit.
The law was placed under an injunction in December 2023 by U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher. The reasoning was that the law could be a violation of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Moody v. Netchoice, in which it was determined that two state laws restricting free speech with social media companies were unconstitutional.
“You can’t use a tool to unconstitutionally restrict free speech, even if you’re also using that same tool to constitutionally restrict free speech,” attorney Frederick Sperling for Penguin Random House explained.
The law has more consequences for freedom of speech than it has for protecting children.
The law, put simply, is incredibly vague. A key issue with the file is how it doesn’t clarify which books are considered too sexually explicit for minors and which books may have brief content that factors into a larger narrative.
According to the Iowa Capital Dispatch, thousands of books were banned from certain Iowa schools including “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “1984,” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”
A famous book such as “To Kill a Mockingbird” might contain a brief snippet of discussions around racism and sexual abuse, but the book doesn’t focus on those in a vulgar or graphic way. The bill suggests minors are receiving books from Pornhub when in reality, the books were made for the implicit purpose of expanding a child’s mind.
If there were books that graphically feature sexual content, not a single school would be left standing without a lawsuit.
This law is so vague that a book could be banned for so much as a mere hint of something amorphous that is intended to educate children and expand their thinking. No one has ever read “To Kill a Mockingbird” and decided to go on a crime spree.
Aside from the vagueness of the law and how it could ban all-time classics, another issue of the law is how the government tries to stick its nose into schools’ business. School boards have the legal responsibility of approving which books are allowed in their schools.
School boards have onsite experience with managing the schools, far more than the government. Board members are selected by elected community members, meaning the government doesn’t need to outright ban books but rather deliberate with the community.
The government has already demonstrated a complete disregard for clarity on the law.
“‘If there’s a single sentence’ in a book that describes a sex act, the book is ‘pulled off the shelves’ without regard to the context and without regard to whether it is made available to third-graders or to graduating seniors who are adults,” Sperling said.
This law may be intended to protect children, but it could consequently make children less thoughtful by not expanding their minds to other possibilities to get them ready for the real world.