Richard Luscombe , The Guardian; Major publishers sue Florida over ‘unconstitutional’ school book ban
"Six major book publishers have teamed up to sue the US state of Florida over an “unconstitutional” law that has seen hundreds of titles purged from school libraries following rightwing challenges.
The landmark action targets the “sweeping book removal provisions” of House Bill 1069, which required school districts to set up a mechanism for parents to object to anything they considered pornographic or inappropriate.
A central plank of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke” on Florida campuses, the law has been abused by rightwing activists who quickly realized that any book they challenged had to be immediately removed and replaced only after the exhaustion of a lengthy and cumbersome review process, if at all, the publishers say.
Since it went into effect last July, countless titles have been removed from elementary, middle and high school libraries, including American classics such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.
Contemporary novels by bestselling authors such as Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume and Stephen King have also been removed, as well as The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank’s gripping account of the Holocaust, according to the publishers."
