Judge hands strong legal blow to Florida lawmakers in a ‘sweeping victory for readers and authors’
Florida – A federal judge has delivered a major setback to Florida’s controversial book ban law by throwing out a key part of it that Governor Ron DeSantis heavily supported. The verdict limits how far the state can go in limiting access to school libraries, especially when it comes to works by nonwhite and LGBTQ writers that were included in broad accusations of obscenity.
In 2023, DeSantis signed House Bill 1069 into law as part of a bigger effort to give parents greater influence over what students can read in classrooms. Any parent could register a complaint about a book under the law, and schools had to stop letting people borrow it for five days while the complaint was being looked into.
Supporters said it was important to keep kids away from things they thought were sexually explicit. Critics said that the method was a way to suppress people and unfairly target a wide range of voices.
A few months after the regulation went into force, a number of publishing houses, writers, and parents sued, saying the policy was against the law. The case had members of the state education board and school boards in two counties as defendants. This Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Carlos Mendoza mostly agreed with the challengers. He said that the part of the law that went after publications that talked about sexual behavior was unconstitutional.
Mendoza’s decision made it clear that the law’s approach was too broad. He noted that entire works were removed for containing even a single reference to sex, regardless of the literary or educational merit of the text. The Color Purple, The Kite Runner, Slaughterhouse-Five, Beloved, and The Handmaid’s Tale were some of the most popular books that were taken off school shelves. Mendoza made it obvious that none of these titles could be fairly called indecent.
“The Florida legislature sought to prohibit material from entering or remaining in school libraries that is not obscene for minors,” District Court Judge Carlos Mendoza said in his ruling on Wednesday.
He said that the automatic removal mechanism was against the law since it silenced some points of view instead of really protecting children. He also rejected arguments that book removals amounted to “government speech,” instead pointing out that they reflected the preferences of objecting parents. Mendoza said that by calling those removals “government speech,” officials were shutting off points of view that they didn’t like.
The judge threw out most of the law, but not all of it. He kept the part relating to “pornographic” content because it can be used with the state’s current threshold for obscenity, which is called the “Miller Test.” This implies that some books may still be disputed and taken down, but only those that meet high standards of obscenity can be forbidden by law.
The Authors’ Guild, which has more than 16,000 members and is a complainant in the dispute, called the judgment a “sweeping victory for readers and authors.” People who support the lawsuit said the decision brings back the balance between protecting children and allowing free speech.
But officials in the state said they would appeal. The DeSantis administration has said many times that the law is needed to protect youngsters from inappropriate information and maintain parental rights.
This decision is one of the strongest legal blows yet to Florida’s recent surge of policies that are changing education and cultural issues. It shows the conflict between parents’ rights to watch over their children and the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. This could lead to a long judicial struggle over the future of school library access in the state.
