School District Bans Dictionaries for Violating “Don’t Say Gay” Law
more than 2800 books from school, including the American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary, and placed them into storage, reports Popular Information.The justification for the dictionary removals is that certain definitions or entries contained in the texts may violate “Don’t Say Gay,” the state’s “parental rights” law that prohibits students in grades K-12 from being exposed to LGBTQ-related content and “age-inappropriate” material. Under the law, residents of any county are empowered to demand the removal of any library book that “depicts or describes sexual conduct,” as defined under Florida law, regardless of whether or not the book is pornographic.Rather than consider individual complaints, the Escambia County School Board adopted an emergency rule last June that required the district’s librarians to review all library books and remove any works believed to contain such content.Because most dictionaries contain in-depth definitions of sex and sexual anatomy and define LGBTQ terms like “gay” and “lesbian,” they were flagged for removal.To purge the flagged books, school libraries in Escambia County were closed at the start of the school year.