Yet More Utah Book Banning Nonsense
It’s a busy period of work travel to various archives so I’ve been slow on some things but I had to share the latest update from Utah and the book banners at the Utah Parents United. Last month the Attorney General’s office issued guidance on how to implement HB374, a law that supporters see as requiring the removal of any school library book that offends them. The memo basically made the same point that I did and that anyone with the most minimal level of legal reading ability would: books cannot be removed unless they are legally obscene and none of the UPU’s attacks meat that standard - OK to be clear the AG’s first memo didn’t say this last part but it laid out the law that clearly reaches that conclusion. This however angered some Republican book banning legislators like Ken Ivory and Karianne Lisonbee. From social media comments Ivory made in particular it is clear that they and some broader group complained to the AG and demanded it be fixed. For those unaware, the Attorney General is directly elected and is a partisan official; he also appoints partisan officials to top level positions but most people who work for the AG’s office are careerists who are not there to serve a partisan agenda. So having said that, AG Sean Reyes is a partisan hack of the first order who’s major goal is to do anything to keep Republican caucus and primary voters happy so he can run for either the U.S. Senate or governor’s seat in the near future.
Now with all of this preface, the AG has issued a new memo that basically just makes clear the first one was completely correct. It begins with the limits of the request that it is only addressing school library materials. Further, it incorporates the first memo except where the two are inconsistent but the two are not inconsistent in any relevant part. But before any legal analysis Reyes has to get in the politics. So it starts off with a bunch of silly garbage about the dangers of porn and how HB374 is about purging porn from schools but never acknowledges that there is no porn in schools. But again, this is about appealing the extremists in the UPU and Natalie Clines hate brigade.
Turning to the law the memo is amazing in avoiding the reality of the situation. It notes that HB374 adopted three standards for “sensitive” material that should be removed. The first two are just the harmful to minors statute and the standard obscenity law. He states that removal under either of these would be legal. That is absolutely correct, no one has ever disputed it. But what he stops at, and what the first memo explains and is incorporated by reference here, is that these statutes both require the book to be judged as a whole. UPU and the other book banners refuse to do that; they only pull excerpts that they believe to be objectionable and then claim it is obscene. Legally this is nonsense and attempting to invoke that in court will lose.
The book banners really wanted the AG to tell schools that they can remove anything they want under the third statute which limits “Indecent public displays.” This law is pretty clearly about selling things like Playboy and Hustler to kids but they want to apply it to book banning and so be it. The part that Ken Ivory and others, and he made this point more than once on social media, hang their hats on is that the legislature declared, in 2(c), that “A description or depiction of illicit sex or sexual immorality … has no serious value for minors.” Now as I explained to Lisonbee (again in a social media exchange) the legislature doesn’t get to define away basic First Amendment law - to which she responded “we will see” or something to that effect. This is where Reyes dances hardest because he knows this declaration conflicts with basic First Amendment law and warns that if a school does not apply the serious merit and work as a whole requirements in this statute it will be on shakier ground in a legal challenge. So the advice to school is to simply adhere to First Amendment obscenity law which any competent lawyer would advise and even a hack like Reyes couldn’t completely ignore.
And again we should remember that the actual book banning activity of the UPU is not about sex alone. As I discussed here, they frequently have attacked books that can’t even come close to their own make believe obscenity standard. Recently, the UPU and Ivory have been harping on the amazing Flamer, a graphic novel that has none of the sexual imagery that they pretend is obscene but does wrestle with the difficult subject of suicidal ideation in the best way I’ve seen yet in print. If you’re curious why bigots hate it, well it’s because the kid is gay. To these folks, affirming queer kids is worse than queer kids killing themselves.
HB 374 was just window dressing. It started as a broad law to force all books dealing with sex out of schools but more sensibly voices won out when they noted this meant purging a whole lot of classic literature - buy Shakespeare! - not to mention things like the Bible. So the law was amended to say nothing more than what the law already provided: schools can’t provide legally obscene material. The problem for book banners is they don’t provide such material. They often ask - only within their echo chamber, the book banners refuse to engage publicly with any disagreement with their theology - if I’m right why do I care about the law? It is because the law is weaponized to threaten schools, teachers, administrators, and librarians with false claims. This is meant to create a system of fear and self censorship. Just yesterday I heard from yet another librarian in Utah about discussions in school library circles suggesting they will just stop buying queer inclusive material, as one example, to avoid the controversy. This is what this loud small minority want: for libraries to work according to their narrow views only. Anyone who isn’t straight, white, or, frankly, Mormon, can go elsewhere because they don’t count in the public sphere. In fact one UPU leader has tried to have librarians criminally charged in Davis County but I’ll share that soon(ish). We have to fight back against their bigotry and hate at every chance we get.
