A bill that would prevent public schools from removing or rejecting textbooks, instructional materials and library books due to themes of race, gender, religion, immigration or sexual orientation has prompted a mini-tempest at the Oregon Capitol.
Senate Bill 1583, sponsored by Sen. Lew Frederick, D-Portland, is a culture wars flashpoint in an otherwise businesslike short legislative session focused on housing, drug law reform and homelessness.
The bill will get a public hearing Tuesday afternoon, followed by a committee vote scheduled for later this week. Ahead of the hearing, nearly 700 people from around the state submitted testimony, with a roughly even split between strong supporters and those in firm opposition.
Similar legislation is under consideration in Colorado, California, Maryland and New Jersey and has passed in Illinois, according to a spokesperson for PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression. A handful of other states, including Missouri, Florida and Utah, have passed laws that expressly seek to ban books, particularly those about LGBTQ+ issues.
Frederick said no outside group asked him to sponsor the bill, which he said he brought forth “to help Oregon students, teachers, parents and communities avoid the political theater in other states that obscure the true education needs we have.”
Oregon law already requires that social studies textbooks and other instructional materials cover the historical, political and cultural contributions of Indigenous people and people of European, African, Asian, Pacific Islands, Chicano, Latino, Middle Eastern or Jewish descent. Curriculum also needs to cover key impacts of immigrants, refugees and people with disabilities and those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
Frederick’s bill would add language that expressly prohibits either school board members or librarians from purging books from an existing collection or declining to add new books on discriminatory grounds.
“This does not force any book on a child,” he said. “It preserves parents making decisions for their children. It does not allow parents to make decisions on what other children read. It does not allow removal of books from a library because someone wants to discriminate against a group or an author.”
Debates over banned books have cropped up in several Pacific Northwest school districts and local libraries in recent years. According to the State Library of Oregon, public entities received 32 complaints challenging 93 different booksin the 2022-2023 school year. The bulk of the complaints centered on the graphic nature of the material and on LBGTQ+ themes.
Among the most prominent of those challenges occurred in the Canby School District, which temporarily removed 36 books primarily written by Black, Latina or LGBTQ+ women from its libraries after parents alleged that their contents were overly “sexual” and “complex.”
After a review, the district banned just one of those books,Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” and restricted four others to the high school library only.
Opponents of the bill said in written testimony that decisions over the contents of a library collection are a matter of local control, not for the state to dictate, and that students shouldn’t have access to graphic material.
“Many of the ‘banned books’ contain very open sexual content that does not belong in children’s reading options,” wrote Ethan Cron, an 11th grader at Sisters High School, in testimony submitted in opposition to the bill. “If a parent so wishes that their child can read those books at home, then so be it, but school libraries should not be handing out pornographic literary material to children without the parent’s prior approval or knowledge.”
But a number of Cron’s classmates, who also submitted testimony, strongly disagreed, saying they supported a student’s right to choose their own books and have access to a broad range of material.
“I think having a space where all students can be seen is important,” wrote Sisters High student Brooke Harper, who said she was part of a library committee at her school. “By ending the ban on books in student libraries, more students will be seen.”
