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From the Daily Caller: A Biden-appointed judge Tuesday blocked an Iowa law requiring all K-12 schools to remove books that feature obscene material and sexual depictions from libraries.
U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher blocked part of Iowa’s Senate File 496, which also bans “instruction related to gender identity and sexual orientation,” due to a lack of constitutional ground for issuing “categorical, content-based rules on books in school libraries,” according to court documents. The ruling is the latest action in a multi-year-long battle over Iowa’s law.
“Senate File 496 makes no attempt to evaluate a book’s literary, political, artistic, or scientific value before requiring the book’s removal from a school library and thus comes nowhere close to applying the ‘obscenity’ standard that is typically used to determine the constitutionality of statewide book restrictions,” the ruling states. “The result is the forced removal of books from school libraries that are not pornographic or obscene.”
The law specifically prohibits public and private schools from teaching or providing “material with descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act,” according to the bill’s text.
Iowa’s Republican Governor Kim Reynolds had signed the bill into law in May 2023, but publishing company Penguin Random House filed a lawsuit to stop it.
Other publishers and organizations then joined the lawsuit, including Macmillan Publishers, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks and The Authors Guild.
We have joined a lawsuit alongside Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks in support of this lawsuit against the State of Iowa and the book-banning provisions of Senate File 496. Learn more here: https://t.co/1tddxVXVFh pic.twitter.com/NgjqLxRudR
— Macmillan Publishers (@MacmillanUSA) April 16, 2024
We have joined the historic fight against Iowa Senate File 496, filing an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. https://t.co/7VYC6ppE9E pic.twitter.com/46rkDXm7KW
— The Authors Guild (@AuthorsGuild) April 20, 2024
Judge renews block on Iowa’s law banning books that depict sex acts from schools https://t.co/CvbuFJlwtd
— Des Moines Register (@DMRegister) March 26, 2025
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