Protests at the Utah State Capitol are usually loud and meant to be disruptive. But that’s not really a librarian’s style.
On Feb. 22 the advocacy group Let Utah Read invited people to the rotunda to support Utahns’ right to read. It was also a chance to weigh in on a bill that will soon make it easier for Utah schools to ban books deemed inappropriate.
A group of librarians, advocates and book lovers arrived with their favorite books — like Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” or Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Then they sat down to read. Quietly.
Their hope was to be loud through their numbers, if not actual decibels.
Lawmakers have already approved Rep. Ken Ivory’s sensitive materials law update. If three school districts, or two school districts and five charter schools, remove a book for being "pornographic or indecent," it'll automatically be banned statewide. The Utah State Board of Education has to tell all school districts and charter schools this within 10 days of that threshold being met. But the bill also gives the board the ability to overturn that automatic statewide ban and reinstate the book within 60 days of the ban.
Rebekah Cummings, co-chair of the Utah Library Association advocacy committee, said it “started in 2022, with HB374, which created a bright line. If a book passed that bright line, it couldn’t be on a library shelf.”
This year’s bill, “makes it even easier to pull books off shelves,” she said.
According to Cummings, “the 2023 school year saw the highest amount of book bans ever.” She attributes the increase to all the recent legislation that enables book banning as well as “the efforts of groups like Moms for Liberty and Utah Parents United.”
Still, Cummings said “book banning is wildly unpopular amongst the vast majority of people” and the data “really shows it’s a handful of people that bring these book challenges again and again.”
A 2023 Deseret-Hinckley Institute poll found that 59% of Utahns are against allowing books to be removed from schools. Only 15% strongly support it.
Reminding the Legislature that this majority exists is why many of the readers showed up — even though it’s too late to do anything about the bill.
Salt Lake Community College English professor Brenda Sieczkowsk said even if “laws have been passed that are limiting, there’s support for the opposite of that. For inclusiveness, for openness, for the freedom of ideas.”
And laws aren’t set in stone. King's English bookseller Antonia Squire said she hopes to see the pendulum swing back the other way.
“Sometimes laws aren’t good. Sometimes laws can be repealed. Sometimes people can say ‘What on earth were we thinking?’”
