On May 26, 2023, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law Senate File 496, which requires the removal of book depicting “sex acts” from school libraries and classrooms. A federal judge initially blocked the law, citing potential unconstitutional application and the removal of books with “undeniable political, artistic, literary, and\/or scientific value.” However, an appeals court later overturned the block.<\/p>\n
The following statement is from FIRE attorney Greg Greubel<\/a>.<\/p>\n Last Friday, FIRE filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in\u00a0Penguin Random House LLC v. Robbins<\/a>, a case challenging Iowa\u2019s sweeping book ban law,\u00a0SF496<\/a>. The law, passed in May 2023, banned public schools from carrying any books that depict a \u201csex act<\/a>,\u201d which was broadly defined.<\/p>\n Our brief urges the court to affirm the district court\u2019s order blocking enforcement of the law, which has already forced school districts to purge hundreds of books from library shelves \u2014 including classics by George Orwell, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner \u2014 simply because their works contain passages that fall under the law\u2019s broad definition of a \u201csex act.\u201d The law imposes harsh penalties on educators who fail to comply, threatening not only their jobs but also their professional licenses.<\/p>\n FIRE argues that Iowa\u2019s law ignores centuries of hard-won lessons about the value of free expression and the dangers of government censorship. We explain that public-school libraries are not instruments of government speech, but unique institutions that serve as repositories of knowledge and forums for intellectual exploration. Attempts to impose top-down, politically motivated control over their collections violate students\u2019 First Amendment right to access information.<\/p>\n FIRE is proud to stand in support of students, educators, and authors. The government should not have the power to dictate which ideas are permissible in school libraries \u2014 especially not through the blunt force of censorship.<\/p>\n You can read our full\u00a0amicus brief here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On May 26, 2023, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law Senate File 496, which requires the removal…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":118917,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-118916","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114972100293574872","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}