First Amendment under siege: Publishers, parents, librarians & kids fight censorship | Opinion
A broad coalition of most of the largest book publishers in the country has come together with Idaho parents, students and librarians to oppose an oppressive, unconstitutional book-banning regime enacted by the Idaho Legislature last year. At an online news conference held Tuesday, authors, lawyers and librarians explained their reasons for filing federal lawsuit against the state.
“I came to the United States with my family from China when I was about 3 1/2 years old,” said Malinda Lo, an author whose books have been subject to banning efforts. “I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, knowing we had come to this country to escape the oppression of the Chinese communist government, which does not allow freedom of expression. So I have always valued my First Amendment rights.”
But the Idaho Legislature does not.
House Bill 710, enacted last year, made it possible for prosecutors to attack libraries for making “harmful” books available to kids, though the standards were always so vague that it was impossible to know what books were safe. It also made it possible for parents to win bounty lawsuits, an effort to turn everyday Idahoans into cooperators with the government against their neighbors.
As was repeatedly predicted before the law passed, the bill has hobbled Idaho kids’ access to libraries. The library in Donnelly, a plaintiff to the lawsuit, had to deny all access to kids in order to keep operating. Denying all the kids in a small, rural town access to books has to be one of the most ignominious things the Idaho Legislature has ever achieved.
It has been clear from the get-go that this law is an unconstitutional attack on the First Amendment rights of all Idahoans, something the federal courts are likely to acknowledge soon.
Just one example: The definition of material harmful to kids in the law includes “homosexuality” but no mention of “heterosexuality,” which Michael J. Grygiel of the Cornell Law School First Amendment argued makes it utterly clear that HB710 engages in constitutionally forbidden viewpoint discrimination — government action aimed to stifle speech because it disagrees with the author’s point of view.
Maybe that explains the ban on Dashka Slater’s “The 57 Bus,” a nonfiction account of an incident in which a nonbinary kid in Oakland was set on fire while riding the bus. Sure, there are some arguments that the book has merit — Time Magazine named it one of the 100 best young adult nonfiction books of all time, for example. But what about all the graphic sex in it?
“There is no sex in my book. There is not even kissing,” Slater pointed out at the news conference.
But, of course, it is about a nonbinary kid. And so, the Nampa School Board voted to ban Slater’s book in 2022 as part of a slate of books that were allegedly “pornographic.” It seems that “pornographic” has gained a special technical definition: whatever conservatives don’t agree with.
The whole point and purpose of HB710 and of the broader, nationwide surge of book banning that it’s part of is viewpoint discrimination. HB710 was brought to you by the Idaho Family Policy Center, a Christian nationalist organization which earlier this year announced the intention to introduce legislation that would require the Bible to be read every day in Idaho classrooms.
As Episcopal Rev. Joseph Farnes pointed out, this would involve a lot of content that probably isn’t suitable for many kids — human sacrifice and women being dismembered as punishment for being sexually assaulted, for example.
But that is all fine because the point of censoring some books and mandating others is to indoctrinate Idaho children with some official state version of Christianity. That’s why the existence of gay people can be considered pornographic, while a Levitical law requiring the execution of gay people could be required reading.
(It’s worth even conservative Christians asking themselves: Is this state religion theirs? These efforts at indoctrination have been driven by adherents of a Calvinist, evangelical version of Christianity, not a Latter-day Saints version, though that is the largest religious group in Idaho. Why isn’t anyone proposing daily readings of the Book of Mormon to every kid in Idaho? Likely because many working to promote these laws do not consider members of the LDS Church to be fellow Christians. As Rev. Ben Cremer pointed out, state religion is the antithesis of religious freedom.)
It’s time Idahoans of all political stripes wake up and start demanding that lawmakers show a modicum of respect for their freedom and constitutional rights, rights lawmakers have repeatedly trampled on for the last several sessions. It shouldn’t take a federal court to protect Idahoans from unconstitutional acts of the Legislature yet again, as the courts have done repeatedly for years now.
Idaho voters should have enough self-respect to punish this abuse of government power at the ballot box. But through the last several elections, the majority — particularly in the closed Republican primary — has consistently demanded heavier chains.