Why are you, Romeo? South Carolina’s new universal library law will restrict access to the classics

Today, the South Carolina State Board of Education introduced new regulations requiring the removal of all books containing any description of “sexual conduct” from every public school library in the state.

This means that classic literary works such as “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Canterbury Tales” and “Ulysses” could be removed from shelves, raising First Amendment concerns.

Blanket bans like the one in South Carolina create blanket, top-down mandates that require school district administrators to review library books without considering whether specific content is appropriate for certain age groups and grade levels.

While the regulations provide a process for determining whether books are age and developmentally appropriate, they state that the material is categorically inappropriate “for everyone the age or age group of children if it contains descriptions or visual depictions of “sexual conduct”. This means schools must prohibit 18-year-old high school seniors from dating everyone library books that describe sex, which may include high school staples such as “Brave New World,” “The Color Purple,” and “1984.”

South Carolina should abandon its categorical ban and instead take an individualized, contextual approach when examining the suitability of any book for a specific group of students.

Public schools and school district administrators have considerable discretion in deciding what they put on library shelves. When assessing whether a library book should be available to students, they consider factors such as age appropriateness, literary merit, and the book’s potential contribution to students’ education. However, the First Amendment prohibits the government from forcing decisions to remove books from a public school library based on hostility to certain ideas or viewpoints or on “narrow partisan or political considerations.” This is because, as the Supreme Court’s plurality explained in Board of Education v. Picostudents’ constitutional rights are “directly and clearly linked to the removal of books from school library shelves” because the First Amendment protects “the right to receive information and ideas.”

South Carolina’s new regulation is similar to an Iowa law that a federal court recently ruled likely violates the First Amendment. By removing a All age groups All books describing sexual conduct, South Carolina’s statewide ban prohibits a broad range of books regardless of age and forgoes individual consideration of books by local policymakers. Instead of holistically evaluating books for different age groups based on legitimate factors such as age appropriateness and literary merit, public school district boards must now automatically remove from every library any book that depicts “sexual conduct” – a term that is too vaguely defined to provide guidance on what is and is not allowed. Do double meanings in Shakespeare’s works count? What about the descriptions of romance in the Old English Canterbury Tales?

As we’ve seen in other states like Florida and Iowa, a blanket ban on topics – whether it’s sex, violence, drug use, or any other potentially controversial topic – can lead district administrators to exclude historical and classic books novels that Americans have read in schools for over a hundred years.

South Carolina should abandon its categorical ban and instead take an individualized, contextual approach when examining the suitability of any book for a specific group of students. By failing to do so, South Carolina law not only conflicts with the Supreme Court’s December 20, 2010 decision Pico and the principles of free speech codified in the First Amendment, but also limit students’ ability to explore the world of ideas outside the classroom.