Banning the book bans

The most aggressive effort yet to block the far-right attacks

Welcome to a Sunday evening edition of Progress Report.

Today’s Pride festivities in New York felt especially exuberant and defiant. In a year that has been marred by so much open homophobia and transphobic violence across the country, the celebrations, while always inherently political, carried the weight of a mass resistance.

The parade is so engrained in the fabric of this city that it’s easy to forget that the reason it’s always held on the last Sunday of June is that it honors the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which marked the beginning of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. The story is summarized on a plaque affixed to the bar’s exterior, easily readable by New Yorkers who need a reminder and tourists that might be passing through the neighborhood.

The site is a national landmark now, but its history is hardly secure. Far-right forces everywhere are trying to scrub LGBTQ+ people and the way they’ve been treated from existence, through both violence — I spotted the vile hate group Gays Against Groomers’ van parked beside Jackson Square today — and attempts to control what children can learn in school.

In tonight’s newsletter, we talk to a lawmaker who is leading an effort to prevent far-right activists from seizing control of public education, and in doing so, creating a template for the rest of the country to follow.

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In January, a small group of parents demanded that seminal LGBTQ-themed books such as All Boys Aren’t Blue and This Book is Gay be removed from the shelves at their town’s public library.

The following month, another town’s Board of Education voted to pull a YA novel titled The Upside of Unrequited, which has LGBTQ themes and interracial families, from circulation in the local middle school library.

A few towns away, a high school librarian has had to sue vicious right-wing parents for defamation after standing up to an organized and relentless push to toss books by Margaret Atwood and Alison Bechdel.

You could hardly be blamed for assuming that these incidents took place in Florida or Texas, which have become the national leaders in banning books that are offensive to especially hysterical conservative white Christians. Yet each of the events represent just a small sample of all the vicious fights that have rocked towns across New Jersey, a state that Joe Biden carried by 16% in the 2020 presidential election.

“It doesn't matter that New Jersey is a blue state, doesn’t matter at all, because it’s a small number of people coming in with a political agenda,” Democratic State Sen. Andrew Zwicker (SD-16) told Progress Report last week. “And then when they start spreading complete disinformation, you can get parents naturally fired up and concerned. So they’ve got a playbook that they can run in a blue state or a red state. The difference is how the state government reacts.”

Thanks to Zwicker’s efforts, New Jersey’s reaction is shaping up to be a typically firm and unambiguous one: His New Jersey Right to Read Act would nip it all in the bud by prohibiting school and local libraries from banning or restricting access to certain books.

Should it pass, the law would make New Jersey only the second state to take such decisive action, after Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a similar bill earlier this month.

As physicist, longtime educator at Princeton University, and the husband of a public school teacher, Zwicker is deeply committed to academic and intellectual freedom. But the bill isn’t simply focused on keeping books on shelves; just as importantly, it would also curtail the cultural proxy wars being fought in raucous school board and town council meetings around the state.

Progress Report spoke with Zwicker at length about the rise of well-financed reactionary parent groups, the different political reactions to his bill, and much more. Below is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

Progress Report: What compelled you to wade into this fight?

Sen. Zwicker: I heard Martha Hickson speak. She's a librarian in Central Jersey, at North Hunterdon High School, who won national awards for standing up to the folks who were trying to get her to censor books. I got invited to a panel that she was on — I was just a member of the audience — and after hearing her speak, I talked to her briefly, and she said “this is just the tip of the iceberg.” And then it was really hearing her stories of harassment and bullying, and the treatment she was receiving online [that motivated me].

You wouldn’t think that sort of thing would happen in liberal New Jersey; but there plenty of more conservative towns within the state. Do you think this is a popular movement of sorts, or pockets of angry people?

There was a Washington Post story, maybe a month or so ago, that pointed out nationally it’s been 11 people who have filed challenges over over 1000 books. In New Jersey, communities are coming out with force to push back against any book bans of any kind. We're seeing that in towns where the local government is Republican and we're seeing it in towns with a local government is Democratic.

The big difference is that state legislatures are being very partisan. I've got a Democratic governor and a Democratic majority in both houses, so I'm very confident we'll get this bill done. And we’ll make it strong and really try to make it model legislation.

Have you have any Democrats in more purple areas of the state complain about making them vote on this?

On the Democratic side, it’s been all “thank you, thank you, we need to do this.” On the Republican side, there has been an instant pivot away from “we agree, we're against banning books” to change the narrative to “we’re for parental rights.”

My co-sponsor in the Senate is the majority leader, and she's been a leader around K-12 Education in New Jersey for over a decade, so she’s all in on this and she wants to see go through both houses as much as I do.

Given the pivot to “parental rights” on the GOP side, do you anticipate getting much bipartisan support?

It’s a good question, and I don't know. So for instance, there have been some conversations with a fairly conservative member of the legislature in New Jersey who we knew is married to a public school teacher. I thought, let's start there, but I don't know if we'll be able to get them or not.

We're gonna go on our summer break next week, so the plan is to have the bill moving through committees when we come back in the fall. He was interesting test case, because he's pretty conservative. I'm hoping to get some of the more moderate Republicans, but we'll see. It's also an election year, so do we get the bill moving before the election or after the election? That will probably have an influence on how bipartisan it might be.

I’d imagine it may also depend on what the bill looks like and how it works. So tell me about that — what are the actual provisions here?

So it’s got two parts. One is something like Library Bill of Rights. Right now we’re looking at a very specific one; I've got some feedback that says, rather than using that one, it should be a general set of principles, which comes down to an agreement not to censor books based upon political ideology.

The second part, and we're working on the language here, is to enable the New Jersey Treasury to withhold some portion of school funding from a school or for a municipality if [banning books] is happening in a municipal public library.

That is currently a little too vague for some people, like the schools. And so we're meeting with the schools over the summer to figure out how to tighten up that language. Because right now, in principle, as written, it would allow the state to withhold 100% of funding, and that is not its intent. How we tighten that up, I’m not sure, but I've got a bunch of meetings with various folks in July to work out that language. It has to be proportional to the funding of the library. We shall see, I don’t yet know the answer.

So when you take up the bill in the fall, do you anticipate maybe changing it at all to get Republicans on board?

The plan is to have it passed out of both houses on the governor's desk before it ends in calendar year. My intent is to make this the best, strongest bill that I can to provide protections to librarians, protections for freedom of speech, and freedom of reading. That is my number one priority. I would hope my Republican colleagues would agree with that and come on board, but if that's not the case, I'm not going to change the bill to try to convince people to come on board.

You work in higher education, so maybe you’re not directly affected, but much does this resonate personally for you?

Is is personal, because in Florida, there was a math book with a word problem that they banned because they felt like it was inappropriate. As someone who spent my entire professional career in the world of academia, freedom of speech and freedom of expression are paramount to everything that I do.

This is a political agenda being driven by a small number of people that are targeting some of our most vulnerable young people. And I just think it's appalling. And it’s happening in universities as well.

Especially in public colleges.

DeSantis is trying to dismantle Florida’s public higher education system and make it into a state-run, political ideology-driven entity, and that’s the antithesis of what higher education is supposed to be.

I also think it's so hypocritical, because, using the Florida example, where the Republican platform used to be about '“small government, keep government out of our lives, leave us alone,” it’s now “well, it depends on the topic.”

It hasn’t happened in New Jersey’s public colleges and universities yet, but do you anticipate preemptively trying to shore up laws around academic freedom and diversity in higher education?

So, on Monday, we had a voting session in the Senate, and we did a bill to codify interracial marriage. It’s crazy that we have to do that in 2023. So the short answer is yeah, because unfortunately, we now live in a climate where we're going to have to just codify basic rights for people.

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