Iowa makes an awful book-banning law even worse

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The pro-censorship, anti-LGBTQ "parental rights in education" legislation that Iowa Republicans muscled through this spring is bad enough on its own.

Critics predicted the mishmash of mostly misguided and overbearing ideas would harm Iowans and be an administrative nightmare to boot. On the latter point, state government seems intent on proving the critics right, showing little interest in providing clarity or in implementing the act's provisions in an orderly and efficient way.

Since we are stuck with the new laws, it's the responsibility of Gov. Kim Reynolds' Department of Education to, expeditiously, accept accountability, take floundering school districts off the hook and lay out explicitly what is and isn't allowed.

The problems are most apparent in the wild variations in how schools are handling Senate File 496's prohibition on "any material with descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act."

In Urbandale, administrators initially flagged hundreds of books to be removed from libraries — and who could blame them for being heavy-handed, when the new law says employees face unspecified discipline from the educator licensing board if they violate the vague law more than once?

In Mason City, an administrator enlisted an artificial intelligence tool to help evaluate dozens of titles she didn't know by heart — and who could blame her, when the law's text demands judging every word of every book in the library by a brand-new standard?

Enough. While local control should be the default for Iowa schools, the Legislature already usurped it with this law. The Department of Education needs to resolve the ambiguity by explicitly listing the books that should be removed from shelves. It can always revise the list, as new titles are published and upon further review of older materials.

Our ideal remains that local community members should make most decisions about their public schools. But in this case, even a terribly censorious list will be better than varying standards and teacher discipline hearings.

Some of the lawmakers defending the law insist there is no ambiguity. "Let's not drag Shakespeare and the Bible into this discussion, because we all know that's not what we're dealing with," state Sen. Ken Rozenboom told the Des Moines Register. State Rep. Helena Hayes: "We are just trying to keep children from being exposed to harmful pornographic material in a society that sells sex."

While those legislators at least cleared the low bar of engaging with Iowans by answering questions from the news media, these quotations go far beyond the text of the law. The governor's initial draft of the bill at least included a weak nod to the idea of exceptions for artistic merit. That didn't make into Iowa Code.

And if "harmful pornographic material" is at issue, the law should have said so. Instead it borrows a definition of "sex act" from the criminal code and can be read to say that no literary discussion of any sexual activity is safe for any high school library — and that acknowledging the existence of same-sex relationships or transgender persons is particularly suspect.

All this emphasizes how startling it is that it took the Department of Education until July, almost two months after Reynolds signed the bill, to say it would develop guidance for districts. Penalties for violating the library provisions can begin Jan. 1, so haste is in order for department employees.

It has been hard even for professionals to keep up with the demeaning, discriminatory laws that now restrict Iowa educators and students. For just one example, Senate File 496 also needlessly removes a requirement for education about the vaccine against HPV, a sexually transmitted virus that can cause cancer.

The crackdown on libraries, though, stands out. It restricts valuable literature and creates incalculable busywork — responses that are wildly disproportionate to the problem, if there even is a problem. The Register's reporting shows that almost 9 in 10 Iowa school districts received no formal challenges to books in the past three years.

Lawmakers pooh-poohed this by saying the challenge processes were onerous, but that's hard to square with the insistence as the bill was developed that malevolent and/or incompetent educators were relentlessly foisting valueless filth on young Iowa children. Only a few dozen adults, statewide, were willing to navigate challenge protocols to respond to these supposed travesties?

State government made this mess, and state government needs to clean it up. That way, schools can, in the short term, focus on teaching children, instead of on locking up award-winning literature. And in the long term, we all should elect leaders with a better handle on what policies might actually protect and help children.