Ruling on Iowa book ban exposes falsity of backers’ claims.

Federal judge points to an alternative the governor and Legislature didn’t take.

Iowa Writers 'Collaborative. Linking Iowa readers and writers.Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds keeps trying to con Iowans into thinking her book ban is something it’s not.

After a federal judge blocked the ban from taking effect last week, Reynolds claimed this was just about trying to keep “sexually explicit” material out of the hands of Iowa children. Attorney General Brenna Bird echoed this line.

For months, Republicans have sought to defend the ban by claiming they’re only targeting a select number of books.

They clearly hope mainstream Iowans will buy this claim and ignore what they really did.

Unfortunately for them, Judge Stephen Locher’s 46-page opinion exposes the falsity of their words.

To me, one of the most striking parts of Judge Locher’s opinion is his observation that Reynolds and the Legislature could have applied a more limited standard that, as he helpfully pointed out, already exists in the Iowa Code; the section of the law prohibiting the dissemination of “obscene materials” to minors.

He writes that “… one book — or even a small handful — arguably could have been removed without violating the First Amendment ….”

But that’s not what Reynolds and crew did.

They purposely chose a route that led to a ban on hundreds of books across the state. Even now, with the ban temporarily blocked, librarians are wrestling with the question of how to respond.

So, why did the Legislature and the governor do this?

It’s a good question. So far, they haven’t said. They’ve just continued to maintain the fiction that this is only about a few “sexually explicit” books.

If that were true, the law would have said so. But it didn’t.

Instead, the law includes a ban—for all grades and regardless of literary merit—any material that contains “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act…”

That language may seem straightforward, but the judge’s opinion makes clear why it’s really not.

What, after all, constitutes a “description?”

Does it have to be graphic?

Well, no. The Legislature expressly rejected that language.

Does it need to be literal? In oral arguments, the state said, ‘yes,’ it does. But the law doesn’t say that.

These may seem to be picayune questions, but when you’re a librarian at risk of state sanction, you want to be sure.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word “description” as “an act of describing,” “discourse intended to give a mental image of something experienced.”

Locher cited this definition in his opinion and applied it to a passage in the book “Last Night at the Telegraph Club,” by Malinda Lo.

In this book, there is a passionate encounter between two women where, at one point, one of the characters “took Kath’s hand and moved it to the cleft of her body … Kath put her hand between Lily’s legs.”

Locher says he interprets this as a “description” meeting the definition of a sex act as set out in Iowa law; specifically, “contact between the . . . hand . . . of one person and the genitalia . . . of another person.”

Is it?

Locher acknowledges reasonable minds might disagree. After all, he notes, “the contact is merely strongly implied rather than unequivocally stated.”

And that’s really the point, isn’t it? Reasonable minds can — and have — differed on how to apply the law’s actual text.

And this is but one passage in one book that librarians from across the state have had to scrutinize, lest they come under attack from some in the Legislature, not to mention a group of conservative parents, who have clearly shown their antagonism toward public educators.

As a consequence, Locher writes, the plaintiffs in the case have identified dozens, if not hundreds, of books with “undeniable political, artistic, literary and/or scientific value” that have been removed.

In recent months, I’ve checked out from the Davenport Public Library some of the books that have, at one time or another, appeared on these ban lists, such as “The Color Purple,” “1984,” “Brave New World,” “Sophie’s Choice,” and “Animal Farm.”

Some of these books I remembered reading when I was younger; others I hadn’t read.

In some of the books, I differed with the librarians who put them on their ban lists. The passages at issue didn’t seem to meet my understanding of the word “definition;” that is, they didn’t offer language intended to create a mental image of a specific event. But others did. Then there were the books that clearly met my definition but weren’t banned at all.

This has been the problem all along.

Maybe the governor and Republican legislators are all on the same page, but a lot of us aren’t a part of their groupthink. And it’s not because, as some lawmakers claim, that a cabal of librarians are brazenly seeking to distort the meaning of the law.

It’s not a distortion when the plain meaning is … well, not so plain.

As Locher writes, to avoid being struck down for vagueness, laws and regulations must “define the offense with sufficient definiteness that ordinary people can understand prohibited conduct.”

Clearly, Reynolds failed this test. So did the Legislature.

Librarians have tried to tell them this. So have students, publishers and authors.

Now, a federal judge is saying it.

On Monday, Iowa House Speaker Pat Grassley suggested that lawmakers may tweak their book ban this session. Like Reynolds, Grassley also is trying to con people into thinking they only went after explicit sexual material. But if that was the case, you wouldn’t think they’d have to make changes. Nobody knows what will happen. All we can hope for is they don’t make matters even worse.

At some point, these politicians need to acknowledge the truth and tell us why they did this; why they supported a law so staggeringly broad, as Locher put it, that it would yank from the shelves even classics that have contributed to the education of Iowans for decades? Especially when they had an alternative route they might have taken.

In a state where education is so embedded in our history that it’s at the very essence of who we are as Iowans, it’s a fair question to ask: Why have they done this?

This column was originally published by Ed Tibbetts’ Along the Mississippi newsletter on Substack. It is republished here through the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative.
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