Utah Continues To Ban More Books, Even As It Racks Up More Lawsuits

Free Speech

from the codifying-the-heckler's-veto dept

Utah’s budding theocracy continues unimpeded as we head into the new year. On top of its other unconstitutional laws (like the oft-challenged social media ban) and legislative proposals, there’s its book ban law that has seen it become the first state to actually remove certain books from all public schools across the state.

The targeted books are exactly the ones you think they are. Of the 13 titles to make the first ban list in 2024, 12 of them were written by women. It has added more titles to the ban list for 2026, as BookRiot reports.

To begin the new year at public schools across the state, Utah officials banned three more books. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky join 19 other titles on a state-sanctioned ban list and must now be removed from all schools.

This law is basically just a heckler’s veto. No consensus is needed to subject a title to removal across the state. The law allows parents to file book challenges which, in reality, means a few bigoted activists will be able to impose their will on every resident in the state.

The law compounds this deliberate error by allowing certain schools (or those being pressured by this small group of anti-freedom activists) to place their thumbs on the scale. Since that’s what the law is designed to do, that’s exactly what has happened:

What is important to understand about the law is that despite claims this is about “local control,” schools in the state are forced to follow the decisions made in other districts. There are 42 public school districts in Utah, but two districts account for nearly 80% of the books banned statewide: Davis School District and Washington School District.

The three latest book bans came exclusively because of bans at Davis, Tooele, and Washington school districts. Again, two districts are doing nearly all of the dictating of what books are allowed at public schools throughout all of Utah.

“Local control” is as meaningless as “representative democracy.” Someone will always find a way to game the system to ensure they keep what they have if not take a little more. Political parties gerrymander. Utah legislators craft laws that allow a small subset of state schools to write the rules for the rest of them.

For now, the law remains in place and the entirety of the state remains under the direct, definitely not “local” control of a couple of school districts. For now. But things could get a bit more interesting soon, now that a serious challenge to the law has been raised by some of the authors directly affected by these bans.

A group of best-selling authors whose books are banned from Utah public schools are suing the state, arguing its sensitive materials law is unconstitutional.

Filed in federal court, the lawsuit comes after three more books were banned from K-12 schools.

[…]

Among those suing over Utah’s book ban law are award-winning novelists Elana K. Arnold and Ellen Hopkins, the Estate of Kurt Vonnegut and two anonymous Utah public high school students.

The lawsuit [PDF] raises questions the state isn’t going to be in any hurry to answer.

The Book Removal Law, codified at Section 53G-10-103 of the Utah Code, is unmoored from the First Amendment and requires Utah’s Local Education Agencies (“LEAs”) to strip their school libraries of any book that contains even a single description or depiction of sex, no matter how fleeting, no matter its context, and no matter its literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The Book Removal Law also never asks the most basic question: appropriate for whom? A kindergartner learning to sound out words and a twelfth-grader weeks from graduation are treated identically. As described below, once a book is labeled “sensitive,” it must be taken from the shelf, including the high school library. There is no recognition that a seventeen-year-old preparing for college, navigating identity, relationships, and the realities of adulthood stands in a fundamentally different place than a five-year-old.

This creates an absurd mismatch with other parts of Utah’s own legal standards. State law permits sixteen-year-olds to consent to certain sexual activity. Yet the same students whom Utah trusts to make intimate, real-world decisions about their bodies are, under the Book Removal Law, barred from accessing out books that contain a mere single passage describing the very conduct in which is lawful for them to engage. The Book Removal Law tells them: you are mature enough to do this, but not mature enough to read about it.

The answer is, of course, that this isn’t about protecting children from content that might be inappropriate for them. It’s about giving bigots and public employees an easy way to remove content they personally don’t like. Because its ulterior motive is its only motive, it’s been written in a way that makes it extremely susceptible to legal challenges. With any luck, this law won’t survive much longer and the people who think no one should have access to content they don’t care for will have to go back to the ineffective seething that seems to make up a disproportionate portion of their existence.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, book ban, censorship, free speech, utah