Committee Moves to Ban More Books

Four more books are recommended for removal from all schools statewide, including The Perks of Being a Wallflower and All Boys Aren't Blue.

This afternoon, the South Carolina Instructional Materials Review Committee met online to discuss challenges to six books. ProTruth South Carolina has provided a recording of the entire meeting via its YouTube channel, which you can view below:

While at least five speakers, including librarians, a high school student, and parents, spoke in support of the challenged books, only the Beaufort parent who had made the four new challenges, and another Beaufort resident, David Cook (who seems to be the same individual responsible for throwing bird seed at the Beaufort County School Board last year) spoke in favor of removing them. The parent who made the previous round of challenges, and who was asked to provide additional information to the committee, did not attend.

Cook claimed that each book violated not only the state regulation that created the committee, but state and federal obscenity laws (although state and federal law call for considerations of artistic and literary merit, which staff attorney Robert Cathcart pointed out had been excluded from the state regulation).

Today’s discussion once again centered mainly on “sexual content”; although Cathcart frequently made reference to “age appropriateness,” the committee did not seek or cite any testimony from subject matter experts, developmental psychologists, or others with credentials in this area. There was never any discussion by committee members about whether a given book was generally “age appropriate,” and other than the lists of “sexual content” presented by the complainant, no additional information about the books was discussed by the committee members.

Ultimately, the Board moved to remove the four new books: Flamer, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, All Boys Aren’t Blue, and Push, from all South Carolina public schools, on the basis that they contained what Cathcart called “violative” sexual content.

It’s unclear what they believed the violative content was, as the committee didn’t go into further detail or discussion, voting unanimously to uphold each of Cathcart’s recommendations.

Flamer, for example, does not contain any explicit nudity or depictions of sexual content that would obviously meet the previous standard set by the committee, which, for example, voted to retain To Kill a Mockingbird and 1984, both of which contain references to sex, but which Chair Christian Hanley and others argued took place “off stage”.

The committee’s recommendations will now go to the full State Board of Education for approval. During the previous cycles, the Board upheld all of the committee’s recommendations, resulting in seven statewide bans and one book restricted to require parental approval.

The next Board meeting will likely be scheduled for the first Tuesday of next month.

ProTruth South Carolina has offered an email template for anyone wishing to contact their local Board member, which is available here.