First They Came For Calvin & Hobbes, And We Peed On Them.
Yep, another school censorship roundup.
The rightwing Christian nationalist drive to censor nearly everything continues nationwide, so America’s kids should be plenty safe from bad ideas, freeing up time for them to find places to hide from school shooters. In Tennessee, a new state law has led school districts to purge hundreds of books from their libraries for naked drawings and statues, sex scenes of any sort, and other unspeakable crimes.
And in Florida, rightwing members of the state Board of Education threatened and browbeat a school superintendent because they were mad he hadn’t simply banned 55 books outright, but had, in accordance with state law, temporarily removed the books for review by the school’s librarians to determine whether they were age-appropriate. But they couldn’t be age-appropriate, because the board had already declared them “pornographic.”
So much to ban! So few brains!
Tennessee: The Volunteer (To Burn Books) State
In Tennessee, the state Lege voted in 2024 to amend a 2022 law that only vaguely said school library materials must be “suitable for the age and maturity levels” of schoolchildren. The amendment got very specific, directing schools to remove materials that “in whole or in part” contain any “nudity, or descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse.” As a result, books had to be removed if they included any nakedness or discussion of sex at all, regardless of context or the works’ overall literary value, and no leeway for librarians to decide. If there’s one thing Moms for Censorship know, it’s that school librarians and English teachers are all Marxist porn-lovers who want to destroy children’s values and abolish Christianity.
As PEN America points out, that’s led school districts to go on a book purge, although what exactly gets removed is up to the school districts. In Monroe County, a whopping 574 books were removed. They include not only the usual suspects like The Handmaid’s Tale, Kurt Vonnegut, Fahrenheit 451, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison, but also dangerous works like Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes and a companion volume to one installment of the popular elementary-level time travel historical fiction series, the Magic Tree House, because it featured a nekkid Greek statue — no peen or butt crack, but that Olympian is nakey all the same.
We’ll add that the list of banned books in Monroe County only provides titles and authors’ names, so we aren’t certain whether only the first, eponymous Calvin and Hobbes book (1987) was sent to the memory hole, or the entire series. It also doesn’t explain why books were removed, but if it’s just the first book, presumably the crime was this one interstitial drawing at the bottom of page 17.
We hope you have not been hopelessly corrupted.
In addition to the 574 titles banned in Monroe County, school districts’ enthusiastic overcompliance with the law has led to the removal of more than 100 titles in Knox County, more than 150 in Rutherford County, more than 320 works in Oak Ridge Schools, and an impressive 400-plus titles in Wilson County. As PEN notes, that’s only a few of Tennessee’s 95 counties, but includes some of the biggest school districts.
The lists are wide-ranging, banning everything from manga and YA books to popular historical titles like Hidden Figures, about the Black women who did the math that got America into space, or George Takei and Steven R. Scott’s They Called Us Enemy, a graphic-novel memoir about Takei’s childhood as an interned Japanese-American during WWII. (This is usually where some rightwing troll shows up to remind us that FDR, who ordered the crime, was a DEMOCRAT.)
In Monroe County, a buttload of books about the Holocaust are also banned: Elie Wiesel’s Night (there’s a brief mention of desperate furtive sex on the train to Auschwitz), The Hidden Children of the Holocaust by Ester Kustanowitz, and of course Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece, Maus, because the graphic novel memoir depicts his mother’s suicide in a bath, with two dots for her nipples. That also damned the book in another Tennessee county in 2022.
The broad range of works banned from county to county — in some districts, Wiesel and Spiegelman remain on high school shelves, but good luck finding Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead graphic novels or any of several popular manga series — just underlines how capricious and arbitrary the law is in practice. In general, though, books are a lot more likely to be pulled if they’re about LGBTQ+ topics, race in America, or scary sex-and-violence topics like abortion and gun control.
Sabrina Baêta, of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, said, “The only thing that all these banned books have in common is the fact that they’re banned. Looking at the lists, practically anyone would be able to find a book they value being villainized and removed.”
As in several other states around the country (Hello Florida!), parents, authors, and PEN are suing to overturn the Tennessee law on First Amendment grounds, in a federal lawsuit against Rutherford County’s censorship regime. Eventually, this madness will be rolled back, unless of course Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale turns out to be prophetic nonfiction. But if that’s the case, it’ll be illegal to make the comparison.
Florida: Board Of Education Tries To Enforce Failed Book Ban Law By Screaming At School Leaders
In its spring legislative session, the Florida Lege introduced book banning legislation that would have broadened the range of books that could be banned. It would have prohibited school districts from considering the materials’ “potential literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” in evaluating them. Just whether the works were “harmful to minors” or “obscene,” which was left up to complaining parents to define. The twin bills in the state House and Senate failed, but hey, that’s no reason not to browbeat school officials in an attempt to ban books, as the state Board of Education did earlier this month.
At a board meeting, Hillsborough County Public Schools Superintendent Van Ayres got an earful of threats and intimidation from members of the board who were absolutely outraged that Ayres followed current state law after being told he absolutely had to permanently remove, with no review, 55 books the board deemed to be “pornographic.” (Do we even need to say they are not pornographic or obscene by any legal definition of the term?)
As Judd Legum points out in his Popular Information newsletter, no parents in Hillsborough County had actually complained about any of the books, but that was no reason not to demand they be removed from schools in the name of “parental rights.”
Many of the books targeted by the State Board are award-winning literature that have been read by students for years — including two finalists for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, Patricia McCormick's Sold and Elana K. Arnold's What Girls Are Made Of. Also included was Forever, a seminal young adult novel by Judy Blume, winner of the American Library Association's Margaret A. Edwards Award, which honors the best young adult authors.
Yes, the books include some sexual content and grown-up themes, just like lots of works that are appropriate for high schoolers. But “pornographic”? Nope, not in any US court. Not yet at least.
Ayres temporarily pulled the 55 books on the Naughty List after he was sent nastygrams by state Secretary of Education Manny Diaz Jr. (R-did we need to say?) and state Attorney General James Uthmeier (R-we did not). But he didn’t arbitrarily send them to the flames or even to a warehouse; instead, he followed state law, kind of. Ayres did permanently pull six books specified by Diaz and Uthmeier — damned if we could find all the titles, but two were Call Me By Your Name and Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts) — and sent the remaining titles to be reviewed by school librarians, or as they’re called in Florida, media specialists, which sounds to us like a demotion.
This was unacceptable!!! to several board members at the June 4 meeting, because why didn’t Ayres do as he was told instead of following state law like some kind of commie lib? One, Kelly Garcia, insisted that the librarians in Hillsborough County should just all be fired and replaced by people “who can read, and have a single shred of decency.” She also told Ayres that “these people, who you trust […] are abusing the children of your county. They’re child abusers!”
Then there was Ryan Petty — like Garcia, a Ron DeSantis appointee — who insisted, “These are nasty, disgusting books that have no place in a school in Florida. Please help me understand what your review process is, because it took me less than five minutes to realize these books violate the statute and they should not be in our schools.” Oddly, Ayers didn’t just praise Petty for his prodigious feat of reading and evaluating 55 books in five minutes.
Petty advised Ayers that what he should do is have some courage and just tell librarians and teachers, “This is inappropriate, I don't care what the rules say, I don’t care what the current process is, this garbage should not be in schools.” Petty said that Ayres should also enforce moral panic by telling media specialists that if any bad books are found on the shelves, they’ll be “terminated immediately.” Probably without due process, too, which we all know is an excuse for terrorists.
Just to make the fascist point clear, Diaz let Ayres know that the state could bring criminal charges against any district employee, including librarians, members of the elected Hillsborough School Board, and administrators, if they were found “complicit” in keeping the 55 “pornographic” books available to students. Allow A Clockwork Orange, Wicked, or Forever… on a shelf, go to jail.
What the hell, Ayers complied, stopped the review, and banned the books. And now kids in Hillsborough County know which books they should get through the Brooklyn Public Library’s ongoing Books Unbanned program, a free e-book library card service for anyone aged 13 to 21 anywhere in America. (You filthy fuckaducks can donate to support the program right here, too!)
[PEN America / Popular Information / Florida Freedom to Read Project]
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Also, mad respect for Bill Waterson in having Calvin be Megalon, because why would a six-year-old watching whatever was on the Saturday movies know that Gojira was the big star?
Update/correction: As pointed out in the replies, I read the strip too hastily: MOM is Megalon, and Calvin, as Gojira, defeated her with his nuclear fireball breath (he spat bathwater on her).
I have made arrangements to be stripped of my Nerd Card and comics collection.
Have they considered not being such nosy fucks?