The Orlando Sentinel published a two-page print spread Thursday listing 673 books that have been removed from classrooms in Orange County in 2023 due to fears they violate the state’s new laws banning “sexual conduct” from public schools.
Teachers with any of the 673 books on their classroom shelves have been instructed by the school district to remove them, the newspaper said, also noting that the Orange County Public Schools (OCPS) staff will review the list of rejected books once again, so it’s possible the books will eventually be returned to the classroom. The district began compiling the list over the summer.
The list stems from two Florida laws signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis ®, who is also running for president. They require media specialists to review books in libraries and classrooms, and to exclude books that include sexually lewd material or pornography. The legislation also aims to give parents greater ability to raise objections to their children’s education.
My 16 year old has done that. He finds a book that’s banned, takes it out of the library (either physical copy, eBook, or audiobook) and then reads it. While doing so, he keeps an eye out for why it was banned.
He noted that one book was banned because one page describes a sexual encounter. It was about 3 lines and wasn’t extremely graphic. It just got the point to the reader that an event happened and then the book moved on. But apparently any mention of sex even existing is enough for a book to get banned.
Unless, it’s the Bible, of course. Then you can have daughters sleeping with their fathers and it’s all good for kids to read!
You have a cool kid. All these things Republicans act like they’re going to stop will just become bigger “issues” because of their actions. History is full of lessons about this type of thing but honestly your 16 year old probably absorbed much more of those lessons than every Republican alive
They didn’t do this banning sooner because the technology didn’t exist to easily keyword search for the words “boobs” and “gay”. These fascist idiots couldn’t sit and read a book for the life of them, let alone consider the context or breadth of potentially “explicit” sections of prose (they also probably think "prose"is some sort of lgbtq slang term because it contains the word rose). You’ll probably find that many of these witch hunts actual burn books that do things like mention “race” in the context of a sporting competition, but something that they ignorantly mistake for discussion of a person’s race and assume bad :(