The nation’s largest publisher and several bestselling authors, including novelists John Green and Jodi Picoult, are part of a lawsuit filed Thursday challenging Iowa’s new law that bans virtually all books depicting sexual activity from public school libraries and classrooms.
The lawsuit is the second in the past week to challenge the law, which bans sexually explicit books through 12th grade. An exception is made for religious texts.
Penguin Random House and four authors were joined in the federal lawsuit by several teachers, a student and the Iowa State Education Association – the state’s teachers’ union, which represents 50,000 current and former public school educators.
The law went into effect this autumn after the Republican-led legislature passed it earlier this year and Governor Kim Reynolds signed it into law in May. In addition to the book ban, the law prohibits educators from addressing gender identity and sexual orientation issues with students through sixth grade, and requires school administrators to notify parents if students ask to change their pronouns or names.
It is the book-banning portion that the latest lawsuit challenges, said Dan Novack, an attorney and vice-president of Penguin Random House. The ban bans books that contain any description or depiction of sex – regardless of context or whether the work is fiction or non-fiction – from schools and classroom libraries in kindergarten through 12th grade.
“It also created the paradox that under Iowa law, a 16-year-old student is old enough to consent to sex, but not old enough to read about it in school,” Novack said.
The law also bans books containing references to sexual orientation and gender identity for students through sixth grade, which the lawsuit says violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
The lawsuit seeks a court order declaring the law unconstitutional, Novack said, adding that the government can’t violate free speech rights “by pretending that school grounds are constitutional no-fly zones”.
The suit does not seek monetary damages.
Schools already have systems in place that allow parents to object to their children reading books the parents find objectionable, said Mike Beranek, president of the Iowa teachers union.
“We have a problem with a law that also censors materials for everyone else’s child,” he said.
Asked for comment on the lawsuit, Reynolds’ office referred to a statement she issued earlier this week in response to a separate lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal on behalf of several families challenging the entirety of the new law. In that statement, Reynolds defended the law as “protecting children from pornography and sexually explicit content”.
The plaintiffs in the latest lawsuit took issue with that characterisation, noting that books banned in Iowa schools include such critically acclaimed and classic works as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Richard Wright’s Native Son and George Orwell’s 1984, showing that “no great American novel can survive” under the law, Novack said.
Novelist Laurie Halse Anderson, a plaintiff in the case whose book “Speak” about a young teenage rape victim was banned from several Iowa schools, was more blunt.
“I think anyone who thinks a book about a 13-year-old rape survivor is pornographic needs professional help,” Anderson said.