Criminalizing Literature in Flagler County, Florida

At one point it was fairly common for police to raid bookstores looking for dangerous literature under the theory that selected books were obscene and unhealthy. Luckily, since the early 1970s, obscenity for books has been dead. From time to time, a person who attempt to file charges and a prosecutor or judge would have to explain that the material in question was not obscene in any real sense of the word legally. In the Fall of 2021, we are seeing a coordinated campaign to return to the days when simply selling a book could land a person in jail. This is why I push back against claims that challengers are just seeking to protect parental rights. What challengers seek is to control the reading of all children and through obscenity law they hope to control the options for all people. These unhinged extremists need to be stopped short in this attempt.

Examples abound in recent news. For example, I’ve written before about the unhinged parent who filed a complaint with police over Lawn Boy even though the officer noted that there was no criminal conduct and it would only be entered as an informational report. Recently the governors of both Texas and South Carolina have instructed their state education agencies to purge books they believe are obscene and pornographic while threatening criminal investigations. The soon to be governor of Virginia is a book banner in their mold. Recently, School Board member Jill Woolbright has filed a criminal report seeking charges against school librarians. The report is here and the core element is reproduced below. At this point it is still an open file so this is the only element that was turned over to me. (UPDATE 11/18/21: The Sheriff’s Department released Woolbright’s witness statement. It clarifies that she did not actually read the whole book and that this complaint was driven by her own horror at the idea that gay people have sex and talk about their experiences.)

She targeted All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, an award-winning memoir of growing up Black and queer. The content of the complaint is pretty much typical for book challenges in recent months. She didn’t read the book but she glanced at two chapters that had the greatest violation to bigots: gay sex! She knows this because she watched some videos of other people, who almost certainly hadn’t read the book, screaming about it as well. This was sufficient to try and get librarians charged with providing obscene material to kids. It is no accident that the books most often challenged by bigots like Woolbright overwhelmingly target LGBTQ inclusive literature. To folks like Woolbright, Krause, Abbot and McMaster queer people should not exist and the best way to achieve that is by making life as hard as possible for queer kids, who are the ones truly harmed by such actions as Woolbright’s.

The charges here are still “under investigation” so we will see what happens. Luckily prosecutors in both Wyoming and Washington have had to explain recently that simply because folks don’t like a book, it doesn’t mean that the book is obscene. After all, as the Supreme Court explained over 60 years ago, “sex and obscenity are not synonymous.” There is no basis for charging librarians for stocking All Boys Aren’t Blue, hell there isn’t even a valid reason to remove it from circulation except to appease censors - and as I have written about, appeasement of censors is never a good idea. In 1993, a Florida prosecutor refusing to charge librarians for stocking gay inclusive children’s books said it best: “You and many others are concerned about the effect of these two books upon your children. The easy answer is neither you nor your children should check them out.” I hope the prosecutor here takes the same step, as the law requires, but I worry that one of these days someone is going to actually put a librarian through the hell of criminal charges to appeal to the bigots.

Luckily, the students and their community are resisting. A key to fighting censorship is community protest. It is too easy for schools to give into these bigoted attacks because school boards too often like to avoid controversy and take the path of least resistance; they will ban books to shut up the people screaming at them at this moment. Standing up against censorship shows that the book censors don’t speak for the community and schools will, sometimes, do the right thing and back down. The community is planning a protest against Woolbright’s bigotry and I hope the school district hears them loud and clear and resists as well. Censorship harms their students, after all.