A federal judge has blocked key parts of Florida’s strict law that banned school library books conservatives call “pornographic” and harmful to children.
As part of a wider attack on diversity in the state, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law in 2023 called House Bill 1069. The law lets parents challenge books they think are inappropriate for school libraries. Under this law, schools must remove a book within five days of a parent’s complaint and keep it unavailable while it’s reviewed. The law mostly targets books with “pornographic” content or those that “describe sexual conduct,” affecting many works by nonwhite and LGBTQ authors.
Last year, several publishing companies, Florida parents, and authors filed a lawsuit to stop the bill. They named members of the state education board and school boards in Orange and Volusia counties as defendants. The lawsuit has largely succeeded.
“By enacting HB 1069, the Florida legislature sought to prohibit material from entering or remaining in school libraries that is not obscene for minors,” District Court Judge Carlos Mendoza said on Wednesday. He ruled that the part of the law targeting books that describe sexual conduct is unconstitutional.
The judge listed examples of books that were removed, including: The Color Purple, Half of a Yellow Sun, Cloud Atlas, The Splendid and the Vile, I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them, On the Road, Nineteen Minutes, Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, The Kite Runner, Slaughterhouse-Five, Shout, Last Night at the Telegraph Club, The Handmaid’s Tale, Native Son, Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa, Water for Elephants, Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Homegoing. The judge said none of these books are obscene.
He added that the law’s focus on books that “describe sexual content” is “overbroad” and “unconstitutional.” He said it “forces schools to remove books that contain even a single reference to the banned topic, no matter the overall value of the book.”
Mendoza also rejected conservatives’ argument that libraries are forums for “government speech.” He wrote that “many removals at issue here are the objecting parents’ speech, not the government’s,” and adding the label of government speech “only serves to silence viewpoints people dislike.” Quoting the Supreme Court, he said, “Parents have the right to ‘direct the upbringing and education of children,’ but the government cannot repurpose their speech as its own.”
The judge did not strike down the law completely. He said the part about “pornographic” content can still be applied if it meets the strict legal standard for obscenity under Florida law called the “Miller Test.”
The Authors’ Guild, one of the groups in the lawsuit representing over 16,000 members, called the ruling “a sweeping victory for readers and authors.”
State officials said they plan to appeal the ruling.
