[Updated on 10/21/23 at 10:00 am ET]
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis faced pushed back on school book bans in the one place he probably didn’t expect. On Sunday, Fox News Host Shannon Bream questioned DeSantis about the hundreds of books banned in Florida classrooms.
“Well, I was at a gathering of women the other night, very informal off the record. But one of the women said, I think it’s terrible in Florida that they’re banning books,” said Beam. “She has a child who is an LGBTQ community and said, I don’t want my child to go somewhere like that. I think that they’re afraid, and the message that they’ve gotten is that teachers will be punished for talking about non-traditional families and — and families like hers.”
DeSantis pushed back, asserting that Florida hasn’t banned “a single book.”
“Well, first of all, there’s not a single book that’s been banned in the State of Florida that is a media hoax, to take a book out of a fourth-grade classroom that’s pornographic because it’s not appropriate for kids of that age. It’s not banning the book. You’re free to do that as an adult if that’s what you want to do,” said the Florida Governor.
The notion that Florida’s relentless banning of books from classrooms is a “media hoax” obviously falls apart when you consider the fact that hundreds of books have been banned across the state. Even Bream gently pushed back, stating that Florida was banning books for “certain classrooms and age groups.”
A recent report from Pen America, a free speech group, found that Florida leads the nation in book bans by a long shot. According to their report, Florida has banned twice as many books as Texas, which holds the second spot on the book-banning list.
It’s also worth noting that the concept that all or even most of these books were banned because they were “pornographic” is absurd. For example, Ibram Kendi’s Antiracist Baby, which is on the list of banned books, isn’t “pornographic.” The children’s book just happens to support an ideology (i.e., racism is something we should be teaching our children is bad) that DeSantis and his friends vehemently disagree with.