Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the right-wing book-purging organization Moms for Liberty, offered a righteous-sounding answer when asked this past weekend on “CBS Sunday Morning” what sort of book she wants to see remain in schools.
That’s hard to square with what just happened in Martin County, Fla. The school district there recently decided to yank from its high school library circulation eight novels by Nora Roberts that are not “pornography” at all — largely prompted by objections from a single woman who also happens to be a Moms for Liberty activist.
“All of it is shocking,” Roberts told us. “If you don’t want your teenager reading this book, that’s your right as a mom — and good luck with that. But you don’t have the right to say nobody’s kid can read this book.”
This signals a new trend: Book banners are increasingly going after a wide variety of titles, including romance novels, under the guise of targeting “pornography.” That term is a very flexible one — deliberately so, it appears — and it is sweeping ever more broadly to include books that can’t be described as such in any reasonable sense.
Martin County is where 20 Jodi Picoult novels were recently pulled from school library shelves. This, too, was largely because of objections from that same Moms for Liberty activist, Julie Marshall, head of the group’s local chapter.
In addition to eight Roberts novels, the latest books removed from some Martin County high schools include Judy Blume’s 1975 classic “Forever …” featuring a high school couple extensively debating whether to have sex. Also purged: “The Fixer” by Bernard Malamud, which won a Pulitzer Prize.
The basis for Marshall’s objections to Roberts’s books, according to parental objection forms obtained and provided to us by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, is this: “These books are adult romance novels. They have absolutely no reason to be in school libraries.”
One can debate whether “adult romance novels” belong in high school libraries, but this process is absurd. That sole objection, with no elaboration, was lodged against a bunch of books written by a single author, leading to their removal.
What’s more, the objection to Roberts’s books appears extremely flimsy. Four of those books, which make up “The Bride Quartet,” are about friends seeking love as they build their wedding-planning business.
The books have some sex scenes, but the language is often vague enough that a child would have little idea what was happening. (“He touched, he tasted, he lingered until her quivers became trembles.”) And — spoiler alert — each book ends with a marriage proposal.
Roberts allowed that the books contain “sex” but noted that it is “monogamous” and “consensual.” Speaking of the censors, Roberts told us: “I’m surprised that they wouldn’t want teenagers to read about healthy relationships that are monogamous, consensual, healthy and end up in marriage.”
Three of the other Roberts books make up the “Dream” trilogy, and each also ends with a marriage proposal. The final Roberts book is a futuristic romance/thriller that does not end this way.
Contacted by email, Marshall declined to elaborate on her objections to Roberts’s books. A spokesperson for the school district argued that such decisions follow guidance created by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration, pursuant to a law he signed last year.
But some of that guidance is ludicrously hazy. One oft-cited feature directs school officials to privilege removal if they would not be “comfortable” reading something aloud in public.
All this shows that red-state book crackdowns are designed to whip up frenzies of book-banning zealotry. Vaguely defined directives enable lone actors to purge whole stacks of books based on frivolous rationales, encouraging parents to hunt for offending books and officials to err on the side of removal. A new PEN America report found nearly 1,500 instances of schools banning books during the first half of the 2022-2023 year, increasingly based on them supposedly containing “pornography.”
“Activists and politicians are inflating the notion of what constitutes ‘pornography’ beyond all recognition,” Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression at PEN, told us. They are going after “romance books, books about puberty or sex education and books that just have LGBTQ characters.”
As Alan Elrod writes for Arc Digital, it’s no accident that activists slapping the “pornography” label on material they deem heretical frequently smear political opponents as “groomers” and “pedophiles.” Note that DeSantis (R) recently released a deranged video loaded with pornographic imagery clearly designed to tar opponents of his book bans as perverts and deviants. This mania is as much about fomenting rage at political foes as it is about targeting books themselves.
Roberts, for her part, divides her time between raising money for libraries and working on her next project. Speaking about the activist who got her books pulled, Roberts joked: “I’m writing another book that this woman can ban.”
