DeSantis vs Newsome

The federal government has no role in overseeing what books are in school libraries beyond ensuring that schools are following the U.S. Constitution and not violating any federal anti-discrimination laws (like the ADA).

 

Presumably to “control” something, there must be some edict or standard being pushed down. So again… where is it?

Outside of constitutional, civil rights, and Title IX type issues, Feds don’t push anything on local schools. Unless you want to correct me with an example.

 

My mom and sister were both public school librarians. A requirement of the position was a Masters degree in Library Science. My mom got hers while raising 3 kids and holding down a full-time job as a teacher. Of course this was 55 years ago in Georgia. So maybe Georgia was just so much further advanced way back then than FL is now. Or maybe you are FOS.

 

Florida only requires school librarians to have a bachelor's degree as do a large number of other states.

Requirements to Become a School Librarian By-State

 

Interesting. Every media specialist I’ve ever known has had a master’s degree. I think that the issue is that there are very few library science/media specialist bachelor’s degrees, I’ve never seen one. Doesn’t mean they don’t exist, though.

BTW, that’s what they’re actually called in the year of our Lord 2023

 

The federal government also sets financial aid policy, administers federal funds, and monitors the use of those funds.

Do you think a statute with no reference to any particular sexual orientation violates federal anti-discrimination law?

 

Administering funds, withholding funds, monitoring funds, and enforcing federal law isn't "controlling?"

"Apart from all of the ways they do control local schools, they don't control local schools."

 

gator_lawyer is more qualified than I am to answer this. My hot take is that the law appears facially neutral, but I've never expected that it will be neutrally applied. I can envision 1st Amendment and Equal Protection arguments but don't know how those might play out. Also not sure whether and to what extent courts might ultimately be able to consider legislative intent or the intent of local officials in specific cases.

I have little doubt this is mostly about religious objections to LGBT acceptance, but officials don't always put their discriminatory motives on the record. We also know that this Court could be moving away from the "neutral applicability" standard based on their comments re: cases like Employment Division v. Smith. In other words, the Court seems prepared to elevate religious arguments above secular ones as opposing to simply making sure that laws are neutral.

 

I'm not sure what the relevance of your question is.

 

So..you’ve got zero specific examples of curriculum or content control by the feds? I’m shocked by your deflection.

The other apparent issue is you think schools are mostly funded by the feds? This is not how it works. Secondary schools are funded almost entirely at state and local level - by property and sales taxes. Only a tiny portion of a school budget comes from the feds, it’s typically in the 10-20% range. The feds mostly give out funding for things like school lunch programs and ADA compliance and special needs type programs. Does that have anything to do with “control” over the curriculum or libraries? I don’t think so.

The closest I can come is when the DOJ gets involved and takes a side in cases involving separation of church and state, and the constitution is pretty clear on that. I vaguely recall the feds threatening money in a few cases like that or Title IX. Thing is if a state said “FU”, our public schools are Bible based schools now - even if they rejected federal dollars they would still be in clear violation of the U.S. constitution.

 

The point is that you're upset about the Florida Legislature telling the local government what to do, but something tells me you wouldn't be mad about the federal government telling the Florida Legislature what to do.

 

You say I don't provide examples of content control, then you proceed to provide examples of content control.

Perhaps it's justified content control, but it's content control nonetheless.

 

I would argue the federal position on that is not “content control”, as no book is banned. The fed doesn’t ban the Bible from schools. The constitution does prohibit government from endorsing any particular religion. Which might logically suggest if you have the Bible, you should probably also have some adjacent books on other religions. There is no hard and fast rule on that either as far as I’m aware. I would actually assume immeasurable instances of schools “favoring” the Bible on their shelves, and it only becomes a thing if a small group from a non-Christian religion asks to be accommodated and is denied. But in that case if the Feds side with the minority religion what are they doing? “Content control”, or protecting constitutionally guaranteed rights? Pretty clearly the latter.

Seems like a lot of people have difficulty grasping that whole separation of church and state thing on these matters. An argument can be made some of the book bans are unconstitutional (the ones done while citing “biblical” issues are blatantly so).

 

That's a disingenuous take. I'm "upset" about the Florida Legislature involving itself in this specific issue, particularly in a way that empowers the people who have been abusing the process and seeking to censor diverse perspectives.

 

Well you're very selective of being upset when a Legislature "empowers people" who abuse a system.

 

You don't need to ban or mandate something to control something. You just need to control levers that incentivize or push behavior in a certain direction and both the federal government and the US Department of Education absolutely do that.

 

Oh look, another tu quoque fallacy that misses the mark.

 

I'm not arguing that people exploiting the system isn't an issue with the policy. That is an issue with every policy.

All I'm questioning is your motive for being mad about this. And you just don't like that because your motives are entirely transparent.

 

We already had this back and forth. I explained it to you. You refused to accept my explanation. I don't see a point in going in circles. They wrote the law SPECIFICALLY to empower the people abusing the system, rather than trying to fix it.

 

And I'm still waiting for any evidence of this.