The book ban signed into law by Gov. Kim Reynolds in 2023 has once again been blocked by a federal judge. On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting the state from enforcing the law requiring schools to remove all books with “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act,” except for approved science or health class texts.
Last August, a three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeal lifted a preliminary injunction Locher issued in 2023, which stopped the book ban from going into effect. The panel said Locher needed to follow the criteria laid out in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in its NetChoice v. Paxon decision, and sent the case back to the district court for further consideration. Locher could not have used the NetChoice criteria, because the Supreme Court did not issue its decision until seven months after Locher made his ruling.
The school book ban was part of a wide-ranging education bill, SF 496, that passed the Iowa House and Senate with only Republican support. In addition to banning those proscribed books from schools, it also prohibited “any program, curriculum, test, survey, questionnaire, promotion or instruction” referencing sexual identity or gender orientation in K-6 schools.
During debate on the book-banning provision of SF 496, Republican lawmakers focused on LGBTQ-themed books, calling them everything from inappropriate to pornographic, but finally settled on the broad language regarding sex in books. After it was pointed out that SF 496 could result in the Bible being removed from school libraries, Republicans added an exemption for the Bible and other religious texts.
SF 496 was scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2024, but in November 2023, the ACLU of Iowa and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of both the book ban and the anti-LGBTQ classroom restrictions on behalf of seven students and Iowa Safe Schools. Two days later, another lawsuit challenging SF 496 was filed.
The second lawsuit was brought on behalf Penguin Random House and four authors whose books were removed from schools in an attempt to comply with the book ban: Laurie Halse Anderson (author of Speak and Shout), John Green (Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars), Malinda Lo (Last Night at the Telegraph Club) and Jodi Picoult (19 Minutes) — as well as an Iowa high school student, three Iowa educators and the state’s largest teachers union, the Iowa State Education Association (ISEA). This lawsuit only challenged the book ban. Eventually, the Author’s Guild and four other major publishers — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, MacMillan Publishing Group and Simon & Schuster — joined the lawsuit.
In the hearing for the original preliminary injunction, Judge Locher consolidated the two cases. On Dec. 27, 2023, he issued a ruling finding the plaintiffs in both cases would likely win their cases challenging the constitutionality of SF 496, and he issued the preliminary injunction.
Locher’s ruling on Tuesday granting a preliminary injunction only involved ithe second lawsuit brought by the publishers, authors and ISEA. In a footnote at the beginning of his 40-page decision, the judge explained, “This ruling will focus solely on the book restrictions in Senate File 496. The constitutionality of other aspects of the law will be addressed in the future in a separate ruling in a separate case.”
Once again, Locher found the plaintiffs were likely to succeed.
“Plaintiffs have established, at minimum, several dozen unconstitutional applications of Senate File 496 involving books that have undeniable political, artistic, literary, and/or scientific value,” he wrote. “This includes books that are: (a) historical classics like As I Lay Dying, Ulysses, Brave New World, 1984, Native Son, and Slaughterhouse-Five; (b) modern award winners or highly acclaimed books like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Song of Solomon, Beloved, The Bluest Eye, The Kite Runner, Nineteen Minutes, Speak, Shout, Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, and Last Night at the Telegraph Club, many of which address bullying, racism, sexual assault, or other forms of trauma and grief; (c) found on the Advanced Placement exam or otherwise serve important educational purposes like The Color Purple, Native Son, The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The judge also pointed out that the broad scope of SF 496’s ban also led schools to remove “non-fiction books about important historical events,” such as the Holocaust and the lives of Black South Africans under Apartheid. The ban also removed books “designed to help young people avoid being victimized by sexual assault like Sexual Predators and The Truth About Rape; and non-fiction books about health and anatomy like Urinary Tract Infections.”
“The application of Senate File 496 to each of these books is unconstitutional … because there is not a substantial and reasonable governmental interest for the removal of any of them,” Locher wrote.
In his ruling, the judge also addressed the Eighth Circuit’s admonition that “Iowa is not required to tolerate speech that undermines or is inconsistent with its central mission of educating Iowa children.” Locher explained that the attorneys for the state had not rebutted the declarations filed by the plaintiffs “that the books that have been removed due to Senate File 496 do not ‘undermine’ the ‘central mission of educating Iowa children’ merely by virtue of being available on library shelves to students who wish to read them.”
“To the contrary, … the availability of those books is wholly consistent with the mission of educating Iowa children because they contribute to reading proficiency and help students understand how to cope with trauma, make informed and healthy decisions about sex, and otherwise understand the complexities of the world around them.”
In a statement after the preliminary injunction was reimposed, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said she would “keep on fighting to uphold our law that protects schoolchildren and parental rights.”
“As a mom, I know how important it is to keep schools a safe place for kids to learn and grow,” Bird said. “Parents shouldn’t have to worry about what materials their kids have access to when they’re not around.”
Gov. Reynolds has not yet made any public statement about the federal court decision. The governor began pushing for a school book ban of the kind created by SF 496 in her January 2022 Condition of the State Speech.
“There’s a difference between late-night cable TV and the school library,” she said.
