Utah Begins The School Year By Banning 13 Books, Including Works by Margaret Atwood and Judy Blume

It’s that time of the year again, kids going back to school and as always, we have another statewide book ban on our hands. That’s right, the Utah State Board of Education has begun the school year by ordering schools to begin removing 13 books that include works by Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur, Sarah J. Maas, Margaret Atwood, and other authors for content that the state has deemed to be pornographic or indecent under a new state law.

News websites such as ABC News, ICv2, and Salon have similarly reported that free-speech advocates have said that this is the first statewide book ban as, traditionally, schools and libraries have decided which books are appropriate for children giving due consideration to their literary or artistic value. The New York Times reported that the edict that was issued on Friday came after the passage of a law that required state education agencies and local school boards to prioritize “protecting children from the harmful effects of illicit pornography over other considerations.”

The Republican Governor, Spencer Cox signed the bill titled H.B. 29 into law this past March, requiring all schools to remove a book if school officials from at least three school districts, or two school districts plus five charter schools, deem that a book constitutes “objective sensitive material.” 

The first set of banned books in the list included Judy Blume’s Forever, a coming-of-age book that touched on Sexuality, Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake,” a post-apocalyptic novel that has been frequently subjected to banning, and Rupi Kaur’s book of poetry, “Milk and Honey,” which is about “violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.” Finally, the only Graphic novel on the list was Craig Thompson’s Two-Time Eisner Award Winning tale, Blankets, which focused on Thompson’s coming out to his parents on no longer being Christian, and was banned due to “Objective Sensitive Material.”

Kasey Meehan, Freedom to Read program director at PEN America, dedicated to protecting freedom of expression, said, “It is a dark day for the freedom to read in Utah… Allowing just a handful of districts to make decisions for the whole state is anti-democratic, and we are concerned that implementation of the law will result in less diverse library shelves for all Utahns.”

Source: ABC NEWS, SALON, THE NEW YORK TIMES, ICv2

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