“Wave of Book Censorship in the United States: Legal Responses and Illinois’ Groundbreaking Legislation to Combat it”

1269 requests withdrawal in 2022, double the attempts in 2021. The American Library Association recently drew up the balance sheet of censorship in the United States, for the second year of existence of a particularly well-organized reactionary movement.

Pressure groups and parents of students report works to the administrative committees of public or school libraries, demanding their removal because of ” obscenity » or «explicit sexual elementsand on the pretext of protect the young.

In fact, these books, selected by librarians because they are appropriate for the age of the readers, generally present only disturbing subjects, characters or ideas. the American right and its supportersfrom the rights of women to those of racialized populations or LGBTQIA+ communities…

What legal response?

Faced with these attempts at censorship, the legal responses are both numerous and poorly adapted. Victims of these withdrawals, in particular students, have already opposed the violation of the First Amendmentwhich guarantees freedom of expression, sometimes causing censors to back down.

After a complaint against the administration of users of the library system, the federal court of Austin (Texas) had issued a preliminary injunctionlast April, forcing the administrators to reintegrate several works withdrawn from the collections and to make them available for loan, pending a final judgment on the legality of the withdrawals.

At the end of 2022, the US Department of Education launched a federal investigation on similar facts, again in the State of Texas, to verify whether they were not contrary to a 1972 provision prohibiting schools from discriminate on the basis of sex, gender and sexual orientation.

The main difficulty remains that some states, such as Texas, again, or Florida, have already adopted legislation facilitating protest movements and censorship of library collections.

Target censorship

The state of Illinois, for its part, is about to enact a reverse provision. House Bill 2789 is soon to be signed by Democratic Governor JB Pritzker: it would introduce the possibility of allocating public funding only to public reading establishments that adhere to the principles of the professional charter of the American Library Association.

This text adopted in 1939 by the organization stipulates in particular that “[l]es documents [de la bibliothèque] should not be set aside or prohibited on the pretext of partisan or doctrinal disapproval“. To receive subsidies, institutions should also commit, in writing, against any form of censorship.

The State of Illinois would contribute approximately 62 millions $ to public reading institutions every year, according to Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias.

Republican opponents argued that the legislation would deprive taxpayers of the benefit of public money, “simply because of their beliefs”, according to the expression of the republican senator Jason Plummer, quoted by Politico.

Photograph: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker in 2019 (illustration, Hanson Professional Services Inc., CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

REPORT – In the United States, a worrying wave of book censorship