Law of unintended consequences catches up with censors

It didn’t take long for Florida’s latest censorship shots to backfire.

A week after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law that public schools must within five days remove access to books that anyone objects to as having pornographic material or describing “sexual conduct,” Miami-Dade schools got those objections to the Bible.

At the same time, Miami-Dade’s Books & Books stores emailed a condemnation of censorship, listing 101 books banned in Florida schools on a form that was also selling those books.

One of the best ways to build sales of books, from classic to obscure, is to ban them as pornography or objectionable. If Ron DeSantis & Co. loathe them, the reasoning seems to be, they must be worthwhile.

That has been the history of the kind of censorship that Florida is engaging in more fiercely each day.

Go back 100 years, when local Watch and Ward Societies tried to protect New Englanders from literature (and also, admittedly, from trash) that they detested. They persuaded Boston to ban books as pornographic. Publishers avidly sought that label, and then promoted sales by printing “Banned in Boston” on book jackets. If you want a national bestseller, publishers knew, get it banned in Boston.

This isn’t to make light of censorship. It’s a serious threat to minds young and old.

But intent as the censors are on keeping students from learning about our nation’s blemishes or gender issues that don’t match Tallahassee’s vision, their efforts are so sweeping that they pull in people whose visions of what is objectional are the opposite of their own – because what is history or literature to many people is objectionable to others, as censorship repeatedly reveals.

Take the complaint to the Miami-Dade Schools on their official “Request for Consideration of Media” form. It objects to the Bible because, in part, “It references sex, murder, hatred, bigotry, incest, slavery, hedonism… idolatry.”

If Miami-Dade schools follow Tallahassee censors’ rules, no later than today they must remove all copies of the Bible until the objection is resolved.

Furthermore, under new rules that the state Board of Education approved last week, any book removed from a Florida school based on an objection must go on a list of removed books to be sent statewide so other districts can be pressured to remove them as well. Each district by June 30 must report book objections and the state must list them for everyone else by Aug. 30.

That statewide list will be very useful: it will make it easy, as state officials intend, for cranks to complain to each of the 67 school districts about books they have never even read to get them removed from schools everywhere. Just one complaint for each book empties the library shelves in every school in the district.

The list will also make it easy, however, for Books & Books and other stores to circulate a complete list of banned books, increasing their sales.

As for the Bible, it no doubt will soon exit banned book purgatory in Miami-Dade and be back on the shelves, as by right it should be.

So should the 101 books that are now being sold as Banned in Florida. But Florida’s censors are already gearing up to prevent that, Paul Burns, a chancellor with the education department, told state Board of Education members last week.

“I’m kind of foreshadowing here that you might see us coming back to this board,” The News Service of Florida quoted him, “because there was some legislation … that’s going to continue to help with this work.”

As for Noemi Collie, who sought a school ban of the Bible, her motive was clear in her letter:

“I do not file this because I believe the Bible is any more or less offensive than any other book you in your wisdom have decided should be allowed or banned, but because I believe it is both ridiculous and insane that one person’s religious or political beliefs could lead to the banning of any book for all others.”
Which of those two, Mr. Burns or Ms. Collie, really belongs in the education department?