TALLAHASSEE, Florida (LifeSiteNews) — A left-wing “free speech” group once again labeled Florida the top state in the nation for “book banning” in a report the mainstream media is highlighting in hopes that it will reflect badly on Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis but which actually illustrates the Sunshine State’s progress in removing age-inappropriate material from public schools.
The Tallahassee Democrat reported that, according to PEN America, more than 4,500 total books (and 4,231 individual titles) were removed from Florida public schools in the 2023-24 school year, sharply up from 1,406 the year before. That accounts for almost half of the 10,000 total removals nationwide.
Thirty-nine percent of the books included “LGBTQ” characters and 57 percent had “sex or sex-related content,” according to the report. (Forty-four percent “included characters of color,” it added, but does not back up the implication that race was a motivating factor for removal.)
“This crisis is tragic for young people hungry to understand the world they live in and see their identities and experiences reflected in books,” PEN America Freedom to Read director Kasey Meehan said. “What students can read in schools provides the foundation for their lives, whether critical thinking, empathy across difference, personal well-being, or long-term success.”
eSantis spokesman Bryan Griffin responded that the “concept that not everything is appropriate to be in a school is still an unacceptable concept to FL print media & Democrats. They’re still trying to equate removing porn from the classroom with a ‘book ban.’ Good thing they’ve rendered themselves irrelevant in this state.”
In August, Griffin responded to a similar attack on the New College of Florida by noting that some “dumped” books were, in reality, “just getting replaced with newer versions,” while standing by the removal of gender studies “propaganda.”
DeSantis has vigorously defended his work to remove ideologically biased or otherwise age-inappropriate material from classrooms, most dramatically during a press conference last year where he presented examples of the sexually explicit material at issue, prompting at least one local television station to cut away from its live coverage.
“Exposing the ‘book ban’ hoax is important because it reveals that some are attempting to use our schools for indoctrination,” the governor has said. “In Florida, pornographic and inappropriate materials that have been snuck into our classrooms and libraries to sexualize our students violate our state education standards.”
That campaign is part of DeSantis’s lengthy, proactive conservative record of making Florida the place “where woke goes to die,” as he said in his second inaugural address, including parental rights, educational standards, and more. Most recently, he led a successful campaign to defeat a well-funded ballot initiative to enshrine a “right” to abortion in the Florida Constitution that would have invalidated all of the Sunshine State’s pro-life laws, including its six-week, heartbeat-based abortion ban.
