By Katharine Turcke
Words transform the world. This is the power of books that captivated me as a child: I spent my youth buried in books, spellbound by story. But my many visits to local Idaho libraries came with warnings. “Read those while you can,” I remember the librarian telling me, gesturing at the stack clutched in small hands. “In a few years, these might not be here.” When I was 12, my middle school library had a banned book section featuring novels facing backlash. Fast forward a few years, and a school board in a neighboring district voted to ban dozens of books, including books I had seen featured on my own school’s shelves.
In 2024, this momentum for book bans culminated in Idaho with the passing of the Children’s School and Library Protection Act. Rather than ban books outright, this law empowers library patrons to demand that books they deem harmful to children be relocated or removed from public library and school shelves.
Even worse, the act is a thinly veiled attempt to impose one narrow set of religious beliefs on others: It utilizes language drafted by the Idaho Family Policy Center, a self-professed conservative Christian organization affiliated with several Christian Nationalist groups. In urging the governor to sign the bill into law, the president of the Idaho Family Policy Center declared that, “It all comes down to whether Gov. Little will protect children by signing H710. We hope – and pray – he does.” While proponents of the new law try to assure the public that this act is not religiously motivated and does not ban books, the Children’s School and Library Protection Act amounts to the same censorship I worried about and witnessed as a child.
This law is a book ban dressed in the language of parental protection, and it spells out trouble for church-state separation and educational freedom in Idaho and beyond.
The Children’s School and Library Protection Act sounds simple. Patrons can complain to a library in writing if they encounter books they deem harmful to minors, the library reviews those complaints, and, if the books are found to be harmful, the law mandates that the library restrict access to the books by relocating them to adult-only sections.
But it doesn’t stop there: If libraries fail to review a patron’s complaint and remove the book within 60 days, this law provides private cause of action to sue the library. In creating a book-ban bounty by opening libraries to the threat of legal action, this law has already had a chilling effect across the state. Some larger libraries now display stop signs prohibiting minors from accessing parts of the library out of fear of lawsuits. Smaller libraries, similarly fearful and lacking the space to create adult-only areas, have coped with the law by announcing that they are forced to label the entire library as adult-only.
Another chilling effect of the law is self-censorship. A librarian for a public high school was instructed to remove dozens of books from her school’s library to preemptively avoid potential challenges. And the law isn’t just harming library patrons and children who are unable to freely access books: A survey by the Idaho Library Association found that over half of Idaho librarians are considering leaving work due to library-related legislation.
While the Children’s School and Library Protection Act spells trouble for Idaho, this book-ban legislation is anything but an isolated attack on educational freedom. For example, an Iowa law passed in 2023 requires all public school library materials to be ambiguously “age-appropriate,” and includes a “Don’t Say Gay” provision that prohibits instruction related to gender identity for children (the law is being challenged in court). Utah’s Sensitive Materials in Schools Act prohibits “certain sensitive instructional material” in schools and has led to dozens of book removals across the state, the majority of which contain LGBTQ+ subject matter.
These examples of book-ban legislation highlight a larger alarming trend: Book bans are surging across the country. Between July 2023 and June 2024, over 10,000 book bans were recorded across 29 states in over 200 public school districts in the U.S. Beyond schools, public libraries have been struck by growing book bans, with the number of titles targeted for censorship at libraries increasing by 92% in 2023 from the previous year alone.
This rapid rise in book bans across the country makes it clear: Advocacy for educational freedom and church-state separation is crucial now more than ever. From speaking out at school board meetings to calling elected officials to supporting book-access nonprofits, our collective action is our best tool to combat censorship.
But more than anything, I take notes from my younger self and keep reading. Words transform the world. As book bans surge, words are more than worth fighting for.
Katharine Turcke is a Youth Organizing Fellow with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
