Censorship in U.S. School Libraries: What Now for the Bible?

Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on June 29, 2023. It was translated into English from French by the Observatory before being edited to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.

The American and international media have recently echoed a barely conceivable piece of news: the Davis County School District—95 schools for 72,000 students, very close to Salt Lake City, Utah—had just announced its decision to ban lower school levels—5-13 years old—from accessing the venerable King James Bible (1611), the very one on which George Washington took the oath on April 30, 1789. This decision followed a request filed with the academic authorities by a parent of a student, who accused the work of violating the principles set out in the federal law promulgated in spring 2022.

This law notably invited parents to play an active role in helping the administration identify so-called “sensitive” content to which students could be exposed. For this parent, there was no doubt that, given the abundance of references to incest, masturbation, bestiality, etc., the incriminated work met the criteria set out in article 76-10-1227 of the state code: out of the question, therefore, to put it in the hands of minors, since it was pornography. Of course, the school board responsible for ruling on this request could not decently share this point of view. The Book is sacred, even for Mormons, the majority in the state, and in this county notoriously inclined towards religion. But it could not entirely disagree with the parent of the student regarding his observation. This is how the decision was made to restrict access to the work to the upper level of 14-18 year-olds only. The board of directors ruled in these terms:

Although the Bible is free of ‘sensitive content’ as defined in [federal] law, it nevertheless includes elements of ‘vulgarity and violence’ to which access should be restricted at lower levels—elementary & middle schools.

It is impossible to distinguish, in this decision, the part of candor. It is important, above all, to protect children and to show that one is listening to parents—from that attributable to the annoyance of educators whose task would be needlessly complicated by the legislative frenzy of elected demagogues. In this last respect, the decision could have the value of a discreet warning to the political class. The Davis County school could have been satisfied with reminding the parent of the existence, in libraries, of a computer system allowing to comply with the will of the parents in order to limit their child’s access to the catalog, outside of the titles listed in the school curriculum. But, in this case, this solution was inappropriate because the parent was calling for the withdrawal of a book on the grounds that it clearly violated federal law. And even if the political nature of this approach was obvious, the institution could not question its sincerity without being accused of bias and exposing itself to having to weigh up all the withdrawal requests filed by the parents themselves or by their associations in order to detect hidden and unmentionable political motivations.

[Related: Academic Freedom and Self-Censorship]

Certainly, we must face the evidence of the determining weight that morality plays in American society, and admit that modesty and prudishness can first and foremost motivate requests for withdrawal castigating, for example, the existential darkness of the subject, the denigration of family or religious values, the crudeness of the language or some overly bold description of the romantic emotions of young protagonists. To which we will add this increasingly obvious fear of hurting anyone in their identity, which leads to advocating the pure and simple disappearance from the shelves of books now considered offensive—i.e. “hurtful”—because of their representation that demeans people because of the color of their skin or their gender or sexual preference. While waiting, of course, for the publication of duly expurgated editions thanks to the expertise of sensitivity readers. But the moral principles put forward can also allow very harmful racist and anti-Semitic values ​​to surface. For example, we find in the list of withdrawal requests currently being investigated in the Davis County academy a book that has been regularly incriminated in schools since its first indictment, among other works, in 1975 by a parents’ committee of a school in Island Trees School District in New York. The charge was formulated as follows: “It is our moral duty to protect the children in our schools from this moral danger as well as from dangers of a physical or medical nature.” The books in question were described as “un-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and simply disgusting.” Among them, therefore, was that of Bernard Malamud, The Fixer—The Man from Kyiv.

Published in 1966, it earned its author the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The story is inspired by a true story, the assassination in 1911 in Kyiv of a young Christian, and the arrest of a Jewish worker, wrongly held in prison for two years for a crime of which he was innocent. The man was unanimously acquitted in 1913, but for two years, the whole world was torn apart over him, with anti-Semites from all countries accusing him of having practiced a ritual crime. Several students opposed the requested book withdrawals and, from appeal to appeal, the case, which became famous, went all the way to the Supreme Court under the title Board of Education v. Pico.

Charged with arbitrating between the inalienable right to information for students in school libraries, under the First Amendment of the Constitution, and the right of the administration to supervise the management of the daily life of the establishments, the Supreme Court could only, in its opinion rendered in 1982, display its deep division. To this day, things seem clear in public libraries, where the First Amendment prohibits any form of filtering or restriction, whether it concerns the choices of consultation of readers or even their dress. In the case of schools, on the other hand, the debate on the degree of latitude to grant the school administration with regard to access to information is not clearly settled, which may explain the activism of parents of students, individual or associative, and the insistence of certain conservative states to enshrine in the law at the federal level a more assertive approach to questions of moral order.

According to the association PEN America, the number of books requested to be removed constantly increases—approx. 20 percent in the last six months. This is apparently attributable to laws passed in several conservative states and to the activism of a network of parent-teacher associations financially supported by the conservative right. Founded in January 2021, the association Moms for Liberty, for example, is very well-known. It has expanded from its initial base in Vero Beach, Florida, to 285 branches in 44 states, with nearly 120 registered members today. Its initial focus was on opposing mask-wearing in schools during the Covid pandemic, but it has evolved into a generic opposition to what it calls anti-Americanism in schools. Its association with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is well-known, and its members are sometimes escorted by the Proud Boys, a far-right militia.

[Related: To End the Nonsense About Academic Freedom]

The school board elections, underway since the spring, have been the subject of massive investment by both the Democratic and Republican parties. Unsurprisingly, the latter has relied heavily on parent associations such as Moms for Liberty. The partial results unfavorable to these associations suggest, however, that, without prejudging the opinion that parents may have on some of their arguments, their confrontational approach will have been judged excessive. As the 2024 presidential elections loom, the radicalization of the Republican Party’s electoral base suggests that candidates will have to wave the scarecrow of culture wars to hope to pass the primary bar.

But it is not at all certain that this meets a deep expectation of the electorate. The recent revocation by the Supreme Court of the decision Roe v. Wade precedent—which legalized abortion—has not, far from it, responded to a general aspiration of the public, and it is hard to imagine a candidate taking on board in his program the radicalism of certain states that have further hardened this measure by even including cases of rape or incest. Nor is it possible to imagine a revision of the authorization of same-sex marriage granted by the Court in 2015—the measure is socially accepted. The school context could, on the other hand, offer a more favorable battleground for mobilization. The repentance demanded by the liberal left because of the ostracization of certain sections of the population in the course of the country’s history clearly makes the right grind its teeth—the folk privilege walk—but in a society so deeply marked by puritanism, the idea of ​​publicly acknowledging past wrongs is not shocking. One point remains, however, that is likely to find a favorable echo in the electorate beyond the conservative MAGA base, and that is the question of transgender people. A recent study from the polling institute Pew Research shows that 58 percent of adults believe trans athletes should compete in sports in the category corresponding to their birth sex. When it comes to presenting gender identity and transition issues in schools, the gap is small: 41 percent are in favor, and 38 percent are opposed.

On both the left and the right, activists are sharpening their weapons, convinced that the outcome of the next presidential election could be decided on this question of gender identity and, in particular, transgender identity. Emily Drabinsky, the new president of the American Library Association (ALA), has clearly announced the color. Its stated aim is ‘Queering the catalog.’ Among observers of this culture war, however, the opinion seems to be spreading the moral ascendancy that the liberal left has claimed, by opposing any censorship of texts dealing with LGBT themes, loses its force singularly when these same liberals find themselves accused of demonstrating similar intolerance, notably when they advocate the withdrawal of great classics such as Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, or even Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.

The replacement of the N-word in this last novel by various euphemisms—slave, serving—has thus allowed the bar of censorship to be passed with new editions, but the feeling seems to prevail that political correctness cannot justify such a sacrilege. As comforting as such a reaction may be, one cannot predict a general surge from it, because, with Twain’s novel, we were touching on a monument of American literature. In truth, the momentum given by these benevolent censors of the dyed-in-the-wool left joins the benevolence of several states anxious to maintain peaceful relations with families. New Hampshire thus passed a law in 2021 called Right to Freedom from Discrimination in Public Workplaces and Education. This moral compass allows to set a course guiding the acquisition of books, thus opportunely limiting the appeals of disgruntled parents. Its influence is also exerted on the teachings provided and allows to bring into line any recalcitrant teachers. Some killjoys see it as a form of censorship. The waltz of books on the shelves does not seem about to stop.

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