Opinion How the ‘sex act’ has become a potent weapon for book banners in Iowa
Their vagueness is the point.
When GOP-controlled state legislatures escalated the passage of laws in 2022 and 2023 restricting school materials addressing sex, gender and race, critics warned that their hazy drafting would prod educators to err on the side of censorship. Uncertain whether books or classroom discussions might run afoul of their state’s law, education officials might decide nixing them would be the “safer” option.
What’s happening in Iowa right now thoroughly vindicates those fears. This week, the Iowa City Community School District released a list of 68 books that it removed from schools to comply with the law. Among the titles: “Ulysses” by James Joyce, “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult, “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison.
The Iowa law requires K-12 schools to remove materials that depict any one of a series of sex acts that include intercourse and other types of genital contact. The law also bans instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation before seventh grade.
Beyond Iowa City, the Des Moines Register reports that school districts across the state have removed hundreds of books from their school libraries, also in response to that law. Among these titles: “1984” by George Orwell, “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut and “Forrest Gump” by Winston Groom.
To be clear, what’s happening here is not necessarily the fault of the districts themselves. Their administrators have worked for months to determine which books must be removed to comply with the law. They’ve asked the state for guidance, but it has mostly not been forthcoming — leaving them in the tough position of navigating the law on their own.
That has led districts to flag books with depictions of “sex acts” that aren’t lascivious or lewd and often aren’t important parts of their content, said Margaret Buckton, a lobbyist for the Rural School Advocates of Iowa. As Buckton told me, “fear” is “motivating districts to interpret even vague descriptions of a ‘sex act’ that aren’t pornographic as meeting this definition.”
No one disputes that in plenty of cases materials depicting such acts should be removed. Nonetheless, the law and the subsequent lack of state guidance are plainly causing officials to cast a wide net. “Many literary classics have sex in them,” said Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education programs at PEN America. “But now the term ‘sex act’ is turning into a blunt instrument to remove scores of books that have all kinds of literary merit and cultural significance.”
Variations of this are proliferating across the country. In Spotsylvania County, Va., school officials removed 14 books because of a state law concerning “sexually explicit” material, and it included two by Toni Morrison. In Missouri, a similar law prompted school librarians to pull dozens and dozens of titles, including “1984” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
And just this past week, children’s publisher Scholastic declared that it has created for its book fairs a separate category for some titles about sexuality, gender and race. That is meant to alert organizers of fairs in states with onerous laws such as Iowa’s to books that might constitute violations without forcing them to sift through the entire Scholastic collection to determine which could be unlawful.
But that separate batch also includes uncontroversial books that merely display tolerance for LGBTQ+ people or tell the life story of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, as Judd Legum reports on his Substack. Putting such books in that cordoned-off category could risk making them more likely to be excluded from fairs.
Scholastic spokeswoman Anne Sparkman told me that thousands of book fairs have opted not to include that separate category of titles, which is highly unfortunate, but she also noted that thousands have included them. As Sparkman rightly pointed out, the haziness of many laws already has many local educators guessing at which books to exclude to avoid self-incrimination, and Scholastic — which opposes such laws on principle — understandably feels obliged to help them navigate this “ambiguity," even if there’s no easy way to do so.
Just as critics predicted, all this vagueness and uncertainty is actively encouraging local education officials to sweep ever more broadly, undertaking more and more book removals in a kind of ever-expanding vortex. In this, one might argue, those laws are functioning exactly as intended.
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