"Challenges our authority:" Florida school board bans book about book bans

“Too many adults wish to 'protect' teenagers when they should be stimulating them to read of life as it is lived” ― Margaret A. Edwards

The Indian River County (FL) school board voted to ban a book about book banning. I wish I had made this up. I did not. It gets worse. In banning the book, the board even overruled its own book review committee, which had green-lit the work. The author, Alan Gratz, must be delighted. He had foreshadowed his work’s fate with its title, "Ban This Book."

The deshelving involved the usual suspects. The complainant, Jennifer Pippin, heads the local chapter of Moms for Liberty. This Orwellian-named organization — it has zero interest in liberty — is the face of the book-burning movement. These Puritans are ever vigilant to remove material they deem inappropriate.

This burning request is not Pippin’s first foray into censorship. In the 2023/24 school year alone, the district has received requests to ban 185 books. Pippin is responsible for 184. FYI, the 185th was from Michael Marsh. He wanted “Green Eggs and Ham” pulled. He argued Dr. Seuss’s picture book was, “not suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material.” FFS.      

In this case, the book is not even racy. Although Pippin's book challenge falsely accused the book of containing sexual conduct. The novel’s cardinal sin is to poke fun at petty authority. The children's novel follows a fictional fourth grader who creates a secret, banned books locker library after her school board pulled a bunch of titles off the shelves.

The board members were irked by its irreverence. They said they disliked how it referenced other books they and their fellow busybodies had removed from schools and accused it of "teaching rebellion of school board authority.”

Board member Kevin McDonald explained the decision. (Note: McDonald was appointed to his position by Gov. Ron DeSantis — a zealot whose political passion is shielding students from "woke" ideologies and looking clueless outside of Florida)

"We are elected — I was appointed, vote of one — we are here to represent the parent's decisions, and the school board is the final authority for our citizens.

The title itself and the theme challenges our authority. And it even goes so far as to not only to mention books that are deemed inappropriate by school boards, including ours, it not only mentions them but it lists them."

“Challenges out authority?” This is the whine of a petulant loser. And his action is that of a limited thinker. I have no idea how many young readers have read this book. But I know the decision by McDonald — and two other ‘Moms of Liberty' backed board members — has guaranteed increased interest.

Any awake parent — or other thinking adult who has been a child — knows that if you want a kid to do something, tell them they cannot do it. As Montaigne drolly observed, “To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.”

Not that Puritans are good at understanding the mind. It is the conservative’s superpower to forget what it was like to be young. It is how a bunch of people who had frequent sex when they were youths can convince themselves that teenagers will ‘abstain’ if their parents tell them to.  

Further, by banning it, the board has shown themselves to be the small-minded people the book highlights.

The board’s decision was not unanimous. One of the two dissenters, Teri Barenborg, the board chair, agreed that the novel’s protagonist, Amy Anne, was naughty. But she pointed out that the story had an uplifting moral arc. Kid does bad. Kid learns a lesson from being bad. Kid ends up a better person. Or, as Barenborg puts it:

“It does not depict or describe sexual conduct, period. Maybe it refers to other books that do but it does not do that itself. It's a cute little book about a little girl that's trying to defy establishment. Does she go about it in the right way? No. Does she learn her lesson? Yes."

Another of the book-banning board members, Gene Posca, noted a subversive intent that must have surprised anyone who had read the book.

"This book is really just a liberal Marxist propaganda piece."

Author Gratz swatted that nonsense away with a laugh

"I am liberal, guilty as charged. I'm not a Marxist by any stretch. I think this is just the case of someone using hot-button political words to try and score points with supporters."

I have nothing to add - except to wonder how stupidity became so fashionable in Florida. And why insanity is a career enhancer in the Sunshine State.