U.S. Senate hearing takes on book bans; Democrats highlight DeSantis' Florida policies

What books should be on school shelves has been not only a question but a pivotal battle in Florida’s culture wars.

It’s far from resolved. And a congressional hearing shows that’s true on the national stage, too.

Lawmakers got heated during a United States Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, titled, ”Book Bans: Examining How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature.”

Republicans bashed Democrats for holding the hearing in the first place, accusing them of trying to intimidate parents trying to speak out for their child. Democrats said the intimidation was coming from the minority of parents and a barrage of political outside interests trying to remove schools' books, many of them featuring diverse characters and topics.

Florida got invoked multiple times during the fray, the controversy-mired state providing ammunition for both sides.

“There’s an organized effort in this country to push ideas, books, literature, through the public school system and libraries that has a very strong political agenda behind it,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the committee’s ranking member.

“In Florida, Ron DeSantis did something you may not like, Mr. Chairman,” Graham said. “In Illinois, you do it a different way. But Gov. DeSantis decided he would step in and stop what he thought was abusive, from his point of view.”

He said that’s up to states and local governments, and the committee senators had no role in it. That point was one of the less controversial ones during the hearing, with Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., saying Congress would pass no laws on the topic, but adding, “I do think it’s important to hold a committee like this to talk to these larger issues.”

The committee’s chairman, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., enumerated those issues during his opening remarks and throughout the hearing.

“Book banning has reached new heights over the past two years,” Durbin said. “Local leaders in states such as Texas, Florida, Utah, Missouri, Iowa, Indiana and others have all recently enacted legislation facilitating banning books in local school districts and libraries.”

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So what's happening in Florida?

School districts across Florida have purged titles from their library shelves since DeSantis signed the Curriculum Transparency Act last year. It came as COVID-19 controversies brought more attention to what was happening in schools, especially from conservative activists and groups like Moms for Liberty.

DeSantis touted the law as a way to increase parental involvement in education and prevent "indoctrination." It requires districts to catalog every book they offer and put a formal review process in place for complaints.

Florida school districts saw 386 book removals from 1,218 total objections last year, according to a recently-released list from the Florida Department of Education.

Books like "And Tango Makes Three," Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye," and "Push" by Sapphire got put on the chopping block. So did titles like "Christian, the Hugging Lion,” a 32-page children's book about two men who raise a lion named Christian in a London apartment.

Then came House Bill 1069, which took effect July 1, creating wildly-varying interpretations on what books should be removed from schools — and putting in question even more books. The law requires school districts to remove within five days any book challenged for including pornography or sexual conduct until the complaint is resolved.

“Nobody’s talking about interfering with the right of a parent to determine what kind of material his or her child should have access to,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii.

The issue, she said, were groups and individuals – not even students’ parents – trying to get books taken off school shelves.

“There are states that have already enacted legislation that makes it pretty easy for anybody to go in and list a book as inappropriate and therefore removed until it goes through some sort of review process,” Hirono said. “I’m specifically talking about Florida, as an example.”

Bandying about 'ban'

The two sides couldn’t even agree on the term “book bans” during the meeting.

“To put it bluntly, books aren’t being banned,” said Max Eden, one of the Republicans' witnesses and a research fellow for the American Enterprise Institute.

Eden, who has done research disputing book ban claims, pointed to how removed books could still be purchased on Amazon. He said that most of the books claimed to be banned by national book access advocates are still in school libraries.

But, for books that are removed, he said communities have to draw a line somewhere. He went on to read an explicit passage from “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a memoir and manifesto by George M. Johnson, who reflects on growing up Black and queer. It’s listed as one of the nation’s most banned books by PEN America, a national free expression organization.

“Personally, I’m not at all troubled that some moms believe this is inappropriate, and that some school boards agree, and I find it kind of weird that the United States Senate is troubled enough to call a hearing about all this,” Eden said.

DeSantis has taken a similar tack in responding to the controversy.

He’s maintained that the idea of book bans across Florida, which have made many headlines, is a "hoax." Conversely, though, he’s bashed books that have been recently restricted in public schools as pornographic, violent or otherwise inappropriate.

“Exposing the ‘book ban’ hoax is important because it reveals that some are attempting to use our schools for indoctrination,” DeSantis said in a statement. “In Florida, pornographic and inappropriate materials that have been snuck into our classrooms and libraries to sexualize our students violate our state education standards."

None of this gave Democrats and their witnesses pause in using the term.

“We need to take any hint of censorship seriously, because free speech is not only crucial to democracy, but imperative to the survival of our civilization,” said Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias.

Giannoulias drafted a law that made Illinois the first state to “outlaw book bans.”

“Our legislation establishes a clear path opposite and away from the damaging trend to ban and censor books that a small, but loud, few disagree with,” he said.

Durbin said he hopes other states will follow Illinois' example.

It's about the First Amendment, said Emily Knox, a library and information sciences professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the chair of the National Coalition Against Censorship’s board.

“Our right to speak, write, publish and read are all protected by the constitution,” she said. “This right is not based on whether or not people agree with the ideas being expressed.”

Knox pointed to 2022 data from the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom that found, of the thousands of titles targeted for censorship, a “vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color.”

Republicans change the subject

During his opening statement, after a couple minutes talking about the hearing's topic, Sen. Graham changed the topic.

“Here’s what we should be talking about,” he said, right before a poster board was propped behind him, labeled, “BIDEN BORDER CRISIS.”

A squabble ensued, about what had and hadn't been done by the parties on illegal immigration.

“I’d like to get this committee involved in trying to fix this problem,” Graham said.

Durbin accepted his invitation, putting an end to the back-and-forth after about 16 minutes.

Some Republicans, like Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, said it’s big tech that needs to be looked at.

“I’m glad we’re having this hearing today,” he said. “I hope that we will have more like it to expose the censorship happening at our highest levels of government.”

He referred to a Louisiana federal judge recently restricting some branches of the Biden administration from communicating or meeting with certain social media platforms about content moderation.

The ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by GOP attorneys general alleging that government officials, under the guise of curbing misinformation, colluded with social media platforms to remove conservative voices and viewpoints, including posts about the COVID pandemic and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Durbin, in closing, said everyone on the committee wanted children to have age-appropriate books.

"There are some serious disagreements, however, about what content is objectionable; it is inevitable and healthy for a democracy," he said. "We need to work together as a country to try and create clearer standards for access to books so that no one individual can cause a book to be banned for an entire community."

Contributed: The USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida's Ana Goñi-Lessan and Steven Walker, and USA TODAY'S Jessica Guynn.

This reporting content is supported by a partnership with Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. USA Today Network-Florida First Amendment reporter Douglas Soule is based in Tallahassee, Fla. He can be reached at DSoule@gannett.com. Twitter: @DouglasSoule.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: DeSantis' Florida policies brought up in U.S. Senate book ban hearing