Iowa at center of book ban movement

By Elizabeth Tharakan >>

Iowa is one of the leading states for book bans in America, second only to Florida, according to PEN America. 

Earlier this year, Iowa’s state Board of Education adopted the rules for a sweeping 2023 education law. The law — and the rules that enforce it — ban “sexual content” in school library books and require them to be “age appropriate.”

The law also bans both discussion and instruction through sixth grade pertaining to gender identity and sexual orientation. The law also requires school administrators to alert a student’s guardian if the child wants to use a different name or pronouns.

“We’ve definitely been paying closer attention to lower ed as these things have been coming out. We’ve been doing a bunch of angles,” said Grace Olson, a K-12 reporter for The Daily Iowan. “There’s a mobile library that’s basically a bus called the Antelope Lending Library. We talked to the people who run a library on wheels to be more accessible to students around the city who can’t commute.”

As the state board debated the rules, the Des Moines Register conducted a statewide survey and found that hundreds of Iowa schools had not removed any books under the law, leading to the removal of more than 3,000 books — including The Color Purple by Alice Walker and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.

Other books include The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and Looking for Alaska by John Green.

The ACLU of Iowa and other groups have fought back against the ban.

“Putting restrictions on these books violates the free speech rights of students to access information. It fails to recognize a difference in maturity between a second grader and a senior in high school and they have different educational interests,” said Grant Gerlock, assistant news director of Iowa Public Radio.

Many of the banned books deal with identity-based experience, like that of being a woman, a person of a specific race, or someone exploring their sexuality. 

“I wrote a story about the student reactions and how queer students are scared for their rights,” Olson said. “If you come from a more conservative family, a lot of [these books are] how LGBTQ+ [students] find their identity and find community with other people. We have seen a lot of students come into school board meetings to voice their opinions. One of the titles that got banned was ‘The Rape of Nanking’ and they were talking about how they’re erasing history in banning titles.”

Iowa Public Radio had a talk show about the law and its impact; another part of the show was about how schools are figuring out how to implement the law. There’s confusion about which books violate the law, so some schools have been more conservative than others about which books they remove. 

“We cover what’s happening in schools, how teachers talk — we talk to a few teachers on air about how it changes their ability to teach books that they feel deserve to be part of a student’s education,” Gerlock said. “You can have these books. You can’t have these other books. Teachers feel they’re losing the opportunity to put some issues before students that can lead to valuable discussions.”

The Iowa State Education Association is a union that initiated a lawsuit blocking the book ban. Other plaintiffs include Penguin Random House; ISEA members and educators Dan Gutmann and Mari Butler-Abry; an Iowa parent and a high school student; and four bestselling authors: Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, Malinda Lo, and Jodi Picoult, whose books have been banned or removed from Iowa school shelves. But the suit failed. In August 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit sent the lawsuit back to a lower court, allowing the law to take effect just before students go back to school. 

“Iowa families, and especially LGBTQ+ students who will again face bullying, intimidation, and censorship as they return for a new school year, are deeply frustrated and disappointed by this delay. Denying LGBTQ+ youth the chance to see themselves represented in classrooms and books sends a harmful message of shame and stigma that should not exist in schools,” said Lambda Legal, the ACLU of Iowa and Jenner & Block in a joint statement.

Elizabeth Tharakan is an attorney and doctoral candidate at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.