Banning books but protecting the right for teens to buy and own assault rifles, no questions, asked.
"...Manatee County’s school district told all secondary school classrooms to remove or cover their classroom libraries until the books could be reviewed under new state standards.
Teachers with unvetted materials or books found to be inappropriate could face a third-degree felony charge."
PEN America ...presented a joint letter with We Need Diverse Books and authors and illustrators of 176 books removed from classrooms in Duval County, Florida, in January 2022 for “review.” They have been kept in storage for 10 months with little indication of when they might return to classrooms.
PEN America reported the removal of the books in Duval County in its report released this past September, Banned in the USA:
The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools.
At the Mountain’s Base, by Traci Sorell and Weshoyot Alvitre
Before She Was Harriet, by Lesa Cline-Ransome and James E. Ransome
Chik Chak
Shabbat, by Mara Rockliff and Kyrsten Brooker
Cow on the Town: Practicing the Ow
Sound, by Isabella Garcia
Dreamers, by Yuyi Morales
Dumpling Soup, by Jama Kim Rattigan, and Lillian Hsu-Flanders
Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story, by Kevin Noble Maillard and Juana Martinez-Neal
The Gift of Ramadan, by Rabiah York Lumbard and Laura K. Horton
Grandfather Tang’s Story, by Ann Tompert and Robert Andrew Parker
Hush! A Thai Lullaby, by Minfong Ho and Holly Meade
Islandborn, by Junot Díaz and Leo Espinosa
Little Night/Nochecita, by Yuyi Morales
Looking for Bongo, by Eric Velásquez
This is happening in Florida, ordered by the governor of Florida, DeSantis.
I never thought I'd live to see the day in America when educators were threatened WITH FELONIES over their freedom to make books available to anyone wanting to read them.
Once you get a committee or governor to decide what you can read in school, where does it go from there?
But here we are, and we can thank the Trumpublicans and Ron DeSantis for this perversion.