In this case I think the district is doing this in protest. The legislators intended to pick and choose, but the district is applying it as written, so Dictionaries are out. They're highlighting how absurd the law is.
In a brief submitted by the State of Florida in support of Escambia, Attorney General Ashley Moody argued that the school board could ban books for any reason because the purpose of public school libraries is to "convey the government’s message," and that can be accomplished through "the removal of speech that the government disapproves."
I agree with both you and HikingVet@lemmy.ca but somehow interpreted that sentence differently. Thanks for helping see it! Not great either way I guess, tho 🙁
Penguin Random House, five authors, two parents of Escambia County students, and the non-profit group PEN America sued the Escambia County School Board last May, alleging that the board's actions violate the First Amendment. The lawsuit relates to decisions by the school board, prior to the passage of HB 1069, to permanently ban several books from Escambia schools.
The Escambia County School Board banned most of these books at the request of Vicki Baggett, a high school English teacher in the county. Baggett is responsible for hundreds of challenges in Escambia County and neighboring counties. She also appeared at the June 2023 board meeting and spoke in favor of the emergency rule.
Pretty bad way to protest by making your students dumber... If they want to protest, they could ban the Bible and I'm sure countless other Christian-themed books that happen to be just fine.
They did ban the Bible, that was one of the thousands of books they removed. Ultimately the school administrators have limited power in this case. They're state employees, they have to follow the law. They're providing the ones who have the actual power here, the voters, with as much ammo as they can which is bad optics. They're doing their best to make the politicians look like incompetent morons.
The politicians crafted this legislation to be super vague in order to let them pick and choose arbitrarily if a book violated it because they didn't want their actual opinions on record. They had wanted this to be applied to a couple dozen existing books and then to have veto power on any new book to be added. Instead the administrators are using malicious compliance to apply it to literally any book that even remotely matches the vague wording. This does two things, first it highlights how completely arbitrary this law is, and second it bogs the censorship board down by burying them in work.
Soon: "All books are now banned because they contain the letters L, G, B, T and Q. Any books containing these five letters will now be banned from public libraries."
I hope they've alerted their groundskeepers that all trees, shrubs, bushes, and flowers must be mowed over, because pollen and flowers are Nature's pole-dancers and sluts. Not sure if they can have grass.
I wish we could do multiple things at once, but it appears we struggle with one. Once Trump goes to prison for trying to steal the election, maybe we can finally send Abbott and DeSatin for human trafficking
Parents NEED to lodge formal complaints with the police and school boards in EVERY district that still has dictionaries and encyclopedias in the libraries.
Whittle down every district until they're only allowed to work on coloring books for every grade K-12, or as close as they can get.
Don't forget to target private schools with massive social media campaigns to inform all parents that dictionaries = grooming. If the private schools refuse to respond, convince the dumber wealthy parents to pull their kids and put them into a safe school, without books.
Coloring books in place of books is exactly how you grow the Republican voter base.
Mindless exploitable industrial scale human production is the end game of the Republican army of the Oligarchy. It's industrial cattle, but humans; eat garbage, consume everything you're told, ask no questions, and barely survive. If anything bad happens, use your gun to take yourself out and/or whatever other farm stock you feel oppressed and frustrated with inside your little pin.
Even if what you're saying is true, and I'm not going to take a position either way, it doesn't have any bearing on my suggestion.
DeSantis is a reply guy with power. This bill wasn't passed because a majority of FL voters want it, not even a majority of his voters. This bill, like many others, was simply him trying to ride the culture war to the White House, but it failed. The only thing keeping it in place in inertia and the desire to save face. That only changes if the political calculus changes.
I guarantee you that if these book bans were exploited to force the closure of ALL public school libraries, remove dictionaries and encyclopedias from all classrooms, and basically made to significantly impact ALL FL parents, or even just the wealthier areas, the public outcry from parents would be enough to reverse it.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Never underestimate the combination of human stupidity, cognitive dissonance, and the sunk cost fallacy all working together. It's amazing how much the truly radicalized will suffer for their cause. Rational people protect their self-interest, but insane people will often die to protect their delusions.
Exactly, parents will care when their children who received a Florida education are not competitive enough to compete in a capitalist environment. They'll realize this soon enough when their children haven't learned anything in school aside from propaganda.
Let them sacrifice their own children to Mammon. It is what they said they wanted, after all. Maybe this will be the wake up call they finally need. They wanted to "stop woke" and didn't realize it meant "stay asleep, plebs."
As someone who train-hooped out of Florida years ago, I fucking warned y'all and now it's happening. I knew this was the trajectory when Jeb Bush got elected in the 1990s and I was in middle school at the time!
I think when parents realize DeSantis just sentenced their kids to fighting to be menial wage slaves for the local corrupt petty bourgeois of every little shithole county while they have to attempt to convince professionals to move to their state they will regret all this and unfortunately the only way they will ever learn is by once again screwing themselves.
I think when parents realize DeSantis just sentenced their kids to fighting to be menial wage slaves
But that's not what happened, it's very clear that brown people came and unfairly took those better paying jobs from our perfectly fine and upstanding American good-ol-boys!
That is the other end of this. No matter how absurd their beliefs are, they will believe them over the facts. No amount of numbers or data will convince them because they have already decided what is true and believe through faith. Republican voters are abusers, pure and simple. They will vote in the manner that maximizes their power and for them that means "parental rights" so they can abuse their own wives and children. It means removing abortion and forcing women to marry their rapists. It means discriminating against and throwing out queer folk in jail to make an example of them and scare others into "integrating" into their "culture" which is nothing more than a breeding program for extra workers.
The challenge is getting normal folks to see that the Republic ideal is a police state enforcing a theocratic breeding and political education program upon the masses and implementing it through the extreme violence against those who dissent.
This isn't conjecture: their biggest mouthpieces like Bannon, Steve Miller, Chris Rufo, Nick Fuentes, and others who form the ideological core of the "new" Republican parties not only admit it, but vocally advocate it. When they speak, may we should listen and believe it when they tell us who they really are.
Pesky Kid: I looked up the word "fascist" on my parent's phone, and it showed a picture of Ron DeSantis. Weirdly, it does the same when you lookup "dumbass..."
I'm not surprised. I haven't read the dictionary but people tell me it talks all about what homosexuals are and what transgender means and it actually defines the word 'lesbian!'
That book defines "racism" and "slavery" and may contain examples. Conservatives definitely don't want white kids finding out their ancestors may have been conservatives.
The reality in Escambia County serves as a rejoinder to DeSantis, who has described concerns about book removals as a "leftist activist hoax" and a "false political narrative."
If Floridians had a dictionary to look up "rejoinder" with, they'd be very upset.
Is no one else looking at this line the school district is at this point just pulling every possible book that could match the description of the law in purpose to make a point?
One teacher made a complaint about a couple of books so they said fine, well just remove everything else that this bill could possibly touch. Just to prove how ambiguous and far stretching this law can go?
Of course they shouldn't pull a dictionary but it matches the description. This is to test the law.
In a brief submitted by the State of Florida in support of Escambia, Attorney General Ashley Moody argued that the school board could ban books for any reason because the purpose of public school libraries is to "convey the government’s message," and that can be accomplished through "the removal of speech that the government disapproves."
