Iowa Book Ban Law Again Mostly Dead Following Return Trip To Federal Court

Will the third time be the charm? Let’s hope so. This charmless act of hatred masquerading as “for the children” legislating has been struck down again by the same federal court that tried to kill it off the first time.

In late December 2023, an Iowa federal court told the state there was little chance of saving its anti-LGBTQ/book ban, given how completely unconstitutional it was. It forbade school libraries from carrying books “containing descriptions or depictions of sex acts.” It also prevented teachers or librarians from mentioning anything related to sexual orientation or gender identity to any student from kindergarten through sixth grade.

The law wasn’t very specific as to what constituted a “sex act,” but to be on the safe side, it created a specific carve-out for the Bible, which contains descriptions of several sex acts. More heinously, the law also wished HIV/AIDS into the ignorance cornfield.

The health curriculum shall include the characteristics of communicable diseases including acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

[…]

The health curriculum shall include age-appropriate and research-based information regarding the characteristics of sexually transmitted diseases, including HPV and the availability of a vaccine to prevent HPV, and acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

The court handling the challenge to the law said this about it on its way to saying the law, as written, was a good as dead, constitutionally-speaking:

The law is incredibly broad and has resulted in the removal of hundreds of books from school libraries, including, among others, nonfiction history books, classic works of fiction, Pulitzer Prize winning contemporary novels, books that regularly appear on Advanced Placement exams, and even books designed to help students avoid being victimized by sexual assault. The sweeping restrictions in Senate File 496 are unlikely to satisfy the First Amendment under any standard of scrutiny and thus may not be enforced while the case is pending. Indeed, the Court has been unable to locate a single case upholding the constitutionality of a school library restriction even remotely similar to Senate File 496.

Whew. You’d think no one would appeal this sort of shutdown, but the Iowa government isn’t spending its own money and wouldn’t even consider briefly borrowing its constitutents’ shame. It appealed this decision and was granted a brief revival by the Eighth Circuit Appeals Court eight months later.

It didn’t exactly green light the law, but suggested the lower court needed to spend a bit more time considering the underlying First Amendment issues. It also suggested that even if it agreed with the lower court’s reasoning, it would only apply the injunction to the named plaintiffs and allow the rest of state to be subjected to their legislators’ open bigotry.

The case has been examined again by the lower court. And, whatever hopes the state may have had about salvaging this terrible law have been dashed again. The lower court is no more impressed than it was the first time around.

Iowa cannot, for now, continue to enforce part of its book ban law, a federal judge said Tuesday, giving major publishers that sued the state the second temporary reprieve they requested.

The new decision from U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher again temporarily blocked the part of the law that prohibits school libraries and classrooms from carrying books that depict sex acts.

[…]

The appellate court told the lower court that it failed to apply the correct analysis in determining whether to temporarily block the law. In his decision Tuesday, Locher stated that the unconstitutional applications of the book restrictions “far exceed” the constitutional applications “under both legal standards the Court believes are applicable.”

In its latest decision [PDF] (which the Associated Press can’t seem to link to or embed in its coverage), the court arrives at the same conclusion it did last time. This isn’t a good lawful. It’s definitely not a lawful law. And it takes time to criticize the state’s hypocritical carve out for its preferred religious text.

In essence, Senate File 496 does what Pico and Pratt prohibit: it imposes a puritanical “pall of orthodoxy” over school libraries by concluding that there is no redeeming value to any book that contains a “description” of a “sex act” even if the book is a work of history, self-help guide, award-winning novel, or other piece of serious literature. See Pico, 457 U.S. at 871 (“Our Constitution does not permit the official suppression of ideas.”) (plurality opinion); see also Tinker, 393 U.S. at 511 (“In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate.”). The fact that the Bible and other religious texts are exempted from Senate File 496 reinforces the problem because it shows that even the Iowa Legislature does not believe all books involving sex acts are devoid of pedagogical value. There is no substantial or reasonable governmental interest that would justify allowing some books with sexual content to be in school libraries but not others.

The injunction is back in force. This will obviously be appealed because the Eighth Circuit reversed it the first time it handled the case. (Of course, it would be appealed anyway because there’s no way the state’s top bigots are going to let this one go until there are no further legal options.) We’ll see what the Appeals Court has to say at some point in the future but, at least for the moment, the Constitution wins and hateful ignorance is back to racking up losses.