SC's Book Censorship Regulation Gets National Attention

Updated to add: Weaver’s book challenge regulation did ultimately pass (essentially by accident). A link to the reg is included below.

The national press cycle on school-related issues tends to skip right over South Carolina on its way from Florida further north, so in a way it was great to see Popular Information covering the impending passage of SC Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver’s book censorship regulation. (And in another way, this is of course bad news because the clock is running out on ways to stop the regulation— which threatens, mostly through lazy, but very expensive, writing— to ban all kinds of book, from widely-recognized classics to popular Young Adult literature.)

You can read the regulation by clicking here. 

If no further action is taken, the regulation, as written, will go into effect tomorrow (June 25, 2024). (Update: it did go into effect, and as of late July 2024, districts are already pulling books from the shelves in a guessing game of what m if not be challenged.) (Keep reading for ideas about how to reach out to decision-makers.) My understanding is that Superintendent Weaver has declined requests from legislators to withdraw the regulation to make it easier for them to conduct their oversight.

South Carolina poised to impose draconian censorship regime on school libraries

According to an investigation from SC ACLU, Miles Coleman, the Federalist Society chapter chair and religious instruction lobby lawyer hired by Weaver to defend, and presumably write, the regulations, is being paid $225 an hour.

I’ve written about these regulations before, and although they got very slightly less scary during the amendment process (thanks to very strong and unprecedented levels of advocacy from a large number of anti-censorship groups, students, parents, teachers, and concerned community members at monthly State Board of Education meetings), the regulation still has the same fundamental flaws:

• It is overly vague, using an extremely broad legal standard of “sexual content” to determine which books can be targeted. (The standard is so broad, it potentially allows, for example, challengers to remove from the state every book that involves the acknowledgement that people have “excretory functions”. So, goodbye Everybody Poops.)

• It was created by people who openly want to abolish the federal Department of Education while introducing religious instruction into schools, yet can’t explain how religious texts like the Bible— which contain explicit “sexual content” under the regulation— would be exempt (other than to say, essentially, trust us.) (The Bible has been challenged and/ or banned under very similar language in several other conservative states.)

• It hands the power to challenge books at the state level to any individual with a child in any public school (which all but openly invites groups like Moms for Liberty to advance their own political agendas through the choice of which books to target). (In Florida, for example, these kinds of restrictions led to banning passages from Romeo and Juliet and other classic works for “sexual content”.)

The Popular Information article does a great job of digging further into the reasons the bill is cause for alarm, and unpopular— at least in its present form— even with many conservative state legislators. (As local coverage from The State Gazette and other publications has already established, the conservative consensus in the SC General Assembly seems to have been that the regulation should be at least delayed until next session so that some actual legislative oversight could take place, but through some kind of error in the resolution-writing process, legislators dropped the ball, meaning it may pass automatically tomorrow, June 25, 2024).

The South Carolina ACLU and other organizations are urging SC citizens to contact their legislators (you can use this form) to urge them to stop or delay passage of the regulation.

Meanwhile, right-wing SC legislators are pushing for free conference powers which would allow the censorship bill H. 3728 to be amended to make it easier for individuals to sue schools. That meeting happens on Wednesday, June 26. The legislature also added a budget proviso, 27.1, which puts public library funding at risk if librarians fail to comply with vague language promising not to provide books that “appeal to the prurient interest” of young people. (This language has been used across the country, empowering people to challenge books despite rarely, if ever, finding any porn, but frequently finding books about Black, LGBTQ+ or other minority people which they can challenge as part of a broader war on public schools.)

You can read some of my previous coverage here:

Your support makes this coverage possible: