A mess of censorship

Book banning is bad business, as school and city officials are finding out in Alta. The school will need to ban potentially hundreds of books if they refer to sex under a new state law. That means that the Alta Municipal Library, which shares its stacks with the Alta-Aurelia School District, would have to do a massive purge of its 21,000 books (60% of which are the city’s).

This has prompted the city to think about establishing its own separate library just so a 7th grader doesn’t have access to a book like Catcher in the Rye. That is not hyperbole. The book is on a list of 347 proposed for censorship in the Urbandale School District. A different list of banned books, with similar classics tagged, is circulating in the Norwalk School District. It’s hard to imagine what Alta-Aurelia might come up with.

We could have more than 300 sets of rules depending on the school district and how prudish an influential set of patrons are with the school board.

We recall several years ago leading Republican legislators declaring that you could not have local control over livestock confinement because you would have 99 sets of rules, and that would be a mess for the pork industry.

Yet the same party thinks it is okay to make school boards into a censorship authority.

The Iowa Department of Education, under the guidance of Gov. Reynolds who cooked up this law, refuses to issue regulations for school districts to follow. Everyone is on their own. That’s not leadership, it’s chaos.

And it is wasteful. The city and school district had a nice thing going, sharing facilities and staff. It saved money. It created a program the city probably could not afford on its own. We’re pretty sure no innocent eyes were exposed to anything of prurient interest that they could not otherwise find on their cellphone or on TV during primetime. Alta and Aurelia always have been able to establish community standards and did not need the assistance of the governor and legislature.

Sen. Lynn Evans, a Republican who supported the book-banning bill, is an Aurelia native and former superintendent of schools. He is confident that the city and school district will work something out. He thinks there is a way to cordon off adult books from sixth graders and the like. The city is not necessarily as optimistic. We certainly appreciate the city’s anxiety over trashing much of its collection.

It’s a shame that the legislature didn’t think this through. It’s too bad we let partisans or holy rollers write our curriculum standards instead of trained educators. You would think the University of Northern Iowa or Buena Vista were grooming socialists and perverts to run our schools. The Department of Education is derelict to just ignore it.

Republicans created a mess for their core constituency: rural Iowa. This is what Alta and Aurelia get — a big headache from stupidity and zeal.