Again the point of making the laws so vague is to instill fear of violating it as no one really knows how much it covers. That is the point of all these laws from Texas, Florida, and other maga states. It is so that people have to go to the extremes to avoid lawsuits that the laws makes almost impossible for them to win. It is all about returning the US to a time when the LGBTQIA was not seen socially nor in media in any positive way. During that time any media mention of the LGBTQIA had to make them the villain and beware little billy of the homosexual man. Of course, little Billy was in far more danger from the local Priest who was presumed a holy wonderful man because he preached the good religion, Christianity. These people pushing these to remove all mention of LGBTQIA from media, books, libraries, rainbows from schools are driven by fundamentalist religion or a desire to return to a time more comfortable for them. A time that existed only because some people did not have full equality to live openly as who they were in society. They hate that equality, and they love to engage in oppression of others.
Then they use the excuse they are preventing indoctrination. Specifically progressive indoctrination. But when you have to remove dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauruses, and Genesis book of records, and any positive mention or anything not cis white republican ideology with forced Christianity what is that? Right wing republican indoctrination. It is reeducation camps. It also is about creating a two tier schools system. The public system for poor people that prepares them to be low level workers / laborers, and the privet schools for upper incomes wealthy kids who will be the overseers / managers/ owners of the workers. Hugs. Scottie
The Escambia County School District, located in the Florida panhandle, has removed several dictionaries from its library shelves over concerns that making the dictionaries available to students would violate Florida law. The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary are among more than 2800 books that have been pulled from Escambia County school libraries and placed into storage. The Escambia County School District says these texts may violate HB 1069, a bill signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) in May 2023.
HB 1069 gives residents the right to demand the removal of any library book that “depicts or describes sexual conduct,” as defined under Florida law, whether or not the book is pornographic. Rather than considering complaints, the Escambia County School Board adopted an emergency rule last June that required the district’s librarians to conduct a review of all library books and remove titles that may violate HB 1069.
Each school in Escambia County has thousands of titles. As a result, many school libraries were closed at the beginning of the school year pending the completion of the review.
At the completion of that process, more than 2800 books were removed from libraries. (This includes, in some cases, multiple copies of the same book.) These books are being reviewed again by the school district. But that process is proceeding extremely slowly. According to a list maintained by the Escambia County School District, fewer than 100 texts have gone through the final review process. Many of these books remain unavailable to students absent a parental “opt-in.”
The dictionaries, according to the school district’s data, remain locked away. Their exclusion demonstrates the preposterously broad language of HB 1069. Dictionaries do contain descriptions of “sexual conduct.” Merriam-Webster, for example, defines sex as a “sexual union involving penetration of the vagina by the penis” or “intercourse (such as anal or oral intercourse) that does not involve penetration of the vagina by the penis.” But the idea that we need to exclude dictionaries from schools to protect children defies all logic.
District staff responsible for the review at each school were given a checklist to determine whether a book should be withheld from students. The checklist suggests reviewers consult “Book Looks,” a right-wing websiterelied on by Moms for Liberty and other groups to justify the banning of books from school libraries. It was created by “Moms For Liberty member Emily Maikisch,” according to public records reviewed by Book Riot.
The Florida Freedom to Read Project (FFRP) obtained a copy of the checklist from the school district, which FFRP provided to Popular Information.
Along with dictionaries, thebooks removedfrom Escambia County school libraries as a result of this process includeeight different encyclopedias, two thesauruses, and five editions of The Guinness Book of World Records. Biographies of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Nicki Minaj, and Thurgood Marshall are also locked in storage.
Classic texts like Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile are no longer available to Escambia County students. Twenty-three novels by Stephen King have been removed. The dragnet has also swept up books popular with the political right including Atlas Shrugged and two books by conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly.
The reality in Escambia County serves as a rejoinder to DeSantis, who has described concerns about book removals as a “leftist activist hoax” and a “false political narrative.”
At the same event, Florida Department of Education Commissioner Manny Diaz argued “[r]emoving clear instances of pornography and sexually explicit materials, often within arms reach of our youngest kids, is not book banning.” How would Diaz describe removing the dictionary?
DeSantis justified his statements by claiming that no school district in Florida had removed more than 19 books. At the time,148 bookshad been removed in Escambia County as part of the challenge process.Now, in part due to DeSantis signing HB 1069, more than ten times that many books have been taken off the shelves in Escambia County. And Escambia County is not an anomaly. Orange County, Florida, which includes Orlando, hasremoved at least 678 booksfrom library shelves.
Authors and parents fight back
Penguin Random House, five authors, two parents of Escambia County students, and the non-profit group PEN America sued the Escambia County School Board last May, alleging that the board’s actions violate the First Amendment. The lawsuit relates to decisions by the school board, prior to the passage of HB 1069, to permanently ban several books from Escambia schools.
The Escambia County School Board banned most of these books at the request of Vicki Baggett, a high school English teacher in the county. Baggett is responsible for hundreds of challenges in Escambia County and neighboring counties. She also appeared at the June 2023 board meeting and spoke in favor of the emergency rule.
Meet the Florida English teacher trying to ban 150 books from school libraries
Baggett has challenged books like And Tango Makes Three, the true story of two male penguins, Roy and Silo, who lived in the Central Park Zoo and raised an adopted chick. Inan interviewwith Popular Information, Baggett said she objected to And Tango MakesThree because it exposes students to “alternate sexual ideologies.” Baggett said she was concerned “a second grader would read this book, and that idea would pop into the second grader’s mind… that these are two people of the same sex that love each other.”
Last year, Popular Information reported that former and current students accused Baggett of being openly homophobic in class. For example, Baggett allegedly told a tenth-grade student that her sister, who had a girlfriend, was “faking being a lesbian for attention” because “nobody’s born that way.”
Florida English teacher pushing book bans is openly racist and homophobic, students allege
More recently, Baggett wasinvolved in a schemethat involved reporting a librarian in a neighboring county to law enforcement for failing to remove a popular young adult novel from the school library.
Although a material review committee in Escambia County voted 5-0 to reject Baggett’s challenge of And Tango Makes Three, the decision was overruled by the school board, which sided with Baggett. “The fascination is still on those two male penguins,” school board member David Williams said. “So I’ll be voting to remove the book from our libraries.”
The lawsuit alleges that the school board banned and restricted books “based on their disagreement with the ideas expressed in those books.” In so doing, the school board has “prescribed an orthodoxy of opinion that violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”
Today, there is an important hearing in the case. A federal judge will consider Escambia County’s motion to dismiss the complaint. In a brief submitted by the State of Florida in support of Escambia, Attorney General Ashley Moody argued that the school board could ban books for any reason because the purpose of public school libraries is to“convey the government’s message,” and that can be accomplished through “the removal of speech that the government disapproves.”This is a novel argument about the purpose of school libraries.
They have to. Words come together to make sentences, and sentences create paragraphs. Then you’ve got people sharing information and getting ideas, and who knows where that could end up? People might start to think.
I knew that I was gay when I was three or four years old. I didn’t know what gay was, and I didn’t know what it meant. I certainly didn’t know about sex. But I knew that I was different from other boys in a way that involved other boys, and I knew that I had better not talk about it whatever it was.
When I was a child, I was a voracious reader. I went through at least two encyclopedia sets. One day, when I was about 10, I was thumbing through the dictionary looking for new words. I found the word “homosexual”, and knew that that word applied to me. It told me that I was not the only one.
And that is what they want to stop. Kids learning anything different other than the religious or right wing party line.
I hope the entry you read back then for homosexual was less judgmental than the one I read as a kid. Mine said being homosexual was about the worst thing in the world, or words to that effect.
I had a similar experience as you. Yet as Johnny says immediately below me, the reading I did secretively in the stacks at our public library did not make me feel confident. In fact, I felt there was something wrong with me. I understood it was who I was, but it was a long time till I could find pride in that.
Businesses and Universities around the country will start rejecting applicants from Florida. Having a diploma that you graduated from the Florida school system will automatically get your resume put into the circular file and it should.
Well they’re also banning science and history books, so why not dictionaries? I’m sure Prager U* can produce some word-books with definitions the fascists will like.
*No idea what the U stands for. Unacceptable? Useless?
I am an older gay guy in a long-term wonderful relationship. My spouse and I are in our 36th year together. I love politics and news. I enjoy civil discussions and have no taboo subjects. My pronouns are he / him / his and my email is Scottiestoybox@gmail.com
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8 thoughts on “Florida school district removes dictionaries from libraries, citing law championed by DeSantis”
DeSantis sounds more and more like Hermann Gehring.
Hi Suze. He is very scary to me. Not so much now that the money is not behind him, but before living in Florida he has no scruples. He was a nobody, third rate fed congress rep who was hated by the rest and did nothing. He would have lost his first run for governor if tRump had not stepped in and had his people barely get him elected. He got tRump’s approval by running advertisements showing him teaching his toddler trump slogans like build the wall, among others. He only won so well on his second run because he made Florida a maga paradise and the democrats ran a stupid low rent candidate who was a republican, then independent, then democrat all to find votes.
He claims to be a big Christian believer wanting to spread Jesus and his message to protect the children from anything LGBTQIA or history about mistreatment about black people that hurts white feelings is mostly pandering. Yes he is a racist bigot, but he is not a deeply religious Christian. He did not even have a bible to be sworn in on for his election to governor. What person claiming to be Christian doesn’t have at least one bible in the home?
So yes he is a malleable threat willing to do anything for power and money. He could be used in the federal government as he has been in Florida to totally roll back all civil rights gained in the last 70 years for anyone but white cis straight Christian males. Hugs. Scottie
Heh. The lack of dictionaries could have to do with the misspelling of indefinitely on the sign outside the library. I’m going to take that not as an actual misspelling, but as a directed commentary about the situation, along with the rest of the sign. I hope the school board notices the misspelling, though; I may be giving FL authorities too much credit.
Hi Ali. My childhood education is so bad and my ability to spell so spotty, I never even noticed the misspelling. I wonder how many in the public did catch it, not because they did know the correct spelling but because the brains fills in the correct word most of the time. Hugs. Scottie
Aww, I used to win spelling bees when I was a sprout, and helped kids with their work. I am not quite a spelling n-word, but I notice misspellings. Interestingly, I can read typos, misspellings, etc. accurately. I did remark this one because A LiBrArIaN did it; that’s why I thought it was a subtle dig about the loss of books. I have a quirky sense of humor.🤭🖖
Yeah uh, what will the, Republicans do next? Worshipping the, illiterates? This is, really, awful, thinking about how these, next generations of students can read the, classics like Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and the, classics.
Hello TAURUSINGEMINI. The fact is tRump once claimed he loves the uneducated. Well to admit the truth he is also one of them, as his teachers said he was the stupidest person they ever tried to teach. Republicans do not want young people to be informed, to be well thinking, to know the past and history of the US. The republicans politicians now want their base / followers to not think but run on emotions of anger and grievance. Hugs. Scottie
Scottie's Playtime 
DeSantis sounds more and more like Hermann Gehring.
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Hi Suze. He is very scary to me. Not so much now that the money is not behind him, but before living in Florida he has no scruples. He was a nobody, third rate fed congress rep who was hated by the rest and did nothing. He would have lost his first run for governor if tRump had not stepped in and had his people barely get him elected. He got tRump’s approval by running advertisements showing him teaching his toddler trump slogans like build the wall, among others. He only won so well on his second run because he made Florida a maga paradise and the democrats ran a stupid low rent candidate who was a republican, then independent, then democrat all to find votes.
He claims to be a big Christian believer wanting to spread Jesus and his message to protect the children from anything LGBTQIA or history about mistreatment about black people that hurts white feelings is mostly pandering. Yes he is a racist bigot, but he is not a deeply religious Christian. He did not even have a bible to be sworn in on for his election to governor. What person claiming to be Christian doesn’t have at least one bible in the home?
So yes he is a malleable threat willing to do anything for power and money. He could be used in the federal government as he has been in Florida to totally roll back all civil rights gained in the last 70 years for anyone but white cis straight Christian males. Hugs. Scottie
LikeLiked by 1 person
Heh. The lack of dictionaries could have to do with the misspelling of indefinitely on the sign outside the library. I’m going to take that not as an actual misspelling, but as a directed commentary about the situation, along with the rest of the sign. I hope the school board notices the misspelling, though; I may be giving FL authorities too much credit.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Hi Ali. My childhood education is so bad and my ability to spell so spotty, I never even noticed the misspelling. I wonder how many in the public did catch it, not because they did know the correct spelling but because the brains fills in the correct word most of the time. Hugs. Scottie
LikeLiked by 1 person
Aww, I used to win spelling bees when I was a sprout, and helped kids with their work. I am not quite a spelling n-word, but I notice misspellings. Interestingly, I can read typos, misspellings, etc. accurately. I did remark this one because A LiBrArIaN did it; that’s why I thought it was a subtle dig about the loss of books. I have a quirky sense of humor.🤭🖖
LikeLike
Yeah uh, what will the, Republicans do next? Worshipping the, illiterates? This is, really, awful, thinking about how these, next generations of students can read the, classics like Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and the, classics.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hello TAURUSINGEMINI. The fact is tRump once claimed he loves the uneducated. Well to admit the truth he is also one of them, as his teachers said he was the stupidest person they ever tried to teach. Republicans do not want young people to be informed, to be well thinking, to know the past and history of the US. The republicans politicians now want their base / followers to not think but run on emotions of anger and grievance. Hugs. Scottie
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