Oregon Senate passes anti-book-ban bill over Republican objections

Oregon school districts would be unable to ban books simply because authors or characters are immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+, disabled or from other protected classes under a bill passed by Senate Democrats on Tuesday.

Sen. Lew Frederick, D-Portland, describes Senate Bill 1583 as a “simple” defense of free speech and a way to guarantee that all children in Oregon have the ability to see themselves represented in books they find in school libraries and classrooms. But it quickly became one of the most controversial issues of the five-week legislative session, with more than 1,600 Oregonians submitting written testimony about it.

“I want to see kids reading and getting books out of their libraries, and I lament that this bill has been politicized,” Frederick said. “This bill is not about politics for me. It’s about kids reading.” 

The bill passed the Senate on a 17-12 party line vote on Tuesday after a heated hour-long debate that included one Republican accusing his Democratic colleagues of wanting to encourage pedophilia and another saying racism is “insignificant.” The bill now heads to the House, where Frederick said he expects it will soon pass out of the House Rules Committee and the full House. 

It comes amid a sharp increase in school book bans in Oregon and nationwide. The Oregon Intellectual Freedom Clearinghouse, run by the Oregon State Library, tracked attempts to remove 93 separate titles from schools and libraries between July 2022 and June 2023. Nationally, the free speech advocacy group PEN America reported nearly 3,400 instances of book bans in the 2022-23 school year, up from 2,500 in the 2021-22 school year. 

In Oregon, more than 70% of the challenged titles were about or written by people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, people with disabilities and other underrepresented groups, according to the state library. 

It’s a personal issue for Frederick: His sharecropper grandparents left Mississippi almost exactly 100 years ago because they were threatened with arrest if they continued trying to teach Black children to read. They moved to the boot heel of Missouri, where they taught his father and other children with free books thrown out by white schools and established an expectation in Frederick’s family that children should learn more than their parents. 

“I tell that story because in some places in this country, that story would not be allowed in a school,” Frederick said. “That story would not be allowed in a book in a school, and that story and stories like it are banned from books in schools across the country.” 

Sen. Kayse Jama, a Portland Democrat who came to the U.S. as a refugee from the Somali civil war, said passing the bill sends a message to people like him and his children that they’re Oregonians and their culture and history matter. 

“There is such a limited selection of books talking about my culture, my religion and my background,” Jama said. “And I want my children to have access to see their culture and their religion reflected through the materials that are in our libraries and our schools.” 

Attempt at amendment

Sen. Art Robinson, R-Cave Junction, rejected the premise that books are excluded for discriminatory reasons, saying no Oregon community would remove books because of the author’s race.

“Despite claims made for political reasons, actual racism in America is insignificant,” Robinson said. “There is no community in Oregon that is going to accept removing books just because they were written by minority authors. It is an insult to tell our communities that a law is needed to protect this.” 

Republicans tried to introduce their own amendment to replace the bill with a new measure creating a task force that would recommend legislation to “better establish standards for age-appropriate curriculum” and limit books that “contain graphic violence, are sexually explicit, contain vulgar language or lack literary merit or educational value.” 

Senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp, R-Bend, said the Republican amendment was necessary because Frederick’s bill would eliminate parental rights and local control. 

“I think we all know that across the nation there have been different states that have handled this in different ways, but we think Oregon should take a little more time and make sure that the values or our communities are being respected,” Knopp said. 

The Republican proposal also included a number of statements indicating the Legislature’s intent, including declarations that the Legislature believes that some unnamed books should not be in schools and that Canby “exhibited the best of Oregon” when it temporarily removed 36 books from school libraries. 

Sen. Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, questioned whether lawmakers consider pedophilia a sexual orientation. He described how the Canby School District ultimately removed just one book from its library: Vladimir Nabokov’s polarizing 1955 novel “Lolita,” narrated by a middle-aged professor who kidnaps and sexually abuses a 12-year-old girl.

“This book paints this man as somebody that is empathetic,” Bonham said. “Is that something we want to teach to our children, that we should empathize with someone who has sexual attraction to a minor?”

Pedephilia is not a sexual orientation, which is defined in Oregon law as “an  individual’s actual or perceived heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality.” 

Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, D-Portland, recalled how one of her sixth grade classmates left the classroom every time the class read from a book about the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Africa because the book included references to menstruation that her classmate’s parents didn’t want her to know about. Parents still would be able to keep their own children from reading certain books.

“Parents still, under this bill, will have the right to make decisions about their own children and promote their own personal values about what they want their children to read or not read,” she said. “But what they won’t have is the right for a very small number of people to make decisions for any other group about how they parent their children and what values they convey to their children.”