Open letter to Ron DeSantis, the Florida Legislature and all those who supported HB 1069:  I hope you’re happy.  Down here in Collier County, the public school district completed its review of the school libraries in time to keep teachers from being arrested.  Nice.

Our media specialists took the state-created training and boy, they went at it.  Every book with a sex scene got removed.  Funny thing is, HB1069 doesn’t ask whether the sex scene makes sense in terms of the overall book.  It doesn’t ask whether the book belongs in the canon of world literature.  It doesn’t ask whether the book has won any awards or brings new voices and viewpoints onto the shelves.  Nope.  It just wants everything 100% sanitized — kind of like Disney’s Donald Duck.  He wears no pants, but no one cares because he hasn’t got the goods.

Y’all like to point to your Bibles and talk about “Judeo-Christian values.”  Well, here’s the thing.  The Constitution protects your religious ideas and beliefs in your home, your place of worship and at religious conferences.  But when you’re elected to do the people’s business, you cannot craft laws that trample on other peoples’ rights and values.  That’s just the way our founders set it up.  You are required to look to the First Amendment, not to religious doctrine.     

But you didn’t do that, did you.  You took it upon yourselves to legislate the morality of public school students by controlling what they can or cannot read in their schools.  How dare you.  This is not legitimate legislation.  This is an exercise in dehumanization, an attempt to transform our students into Donald Duck.  But they are not Disney characters and never will be.  Why would you — our governor, legislators and fellow citizens — want to strip from our young people the very essence of what it means to be human?  What a cold, cruel agenda — and a frightening one as well. 

The truth is, this bill was never about pornography.  No student wanting to see porn patronizes the school library!  No, you wanted to “purify” all the books in a desperate effort to return to an imagined golden past.  You wanted to demonstrate, yet again, that those who are straight and self-righteously “Judeo-Christian” still have the power to silence all other voices.  You wanted to trample the line between church and state, because you don’t respect any limits on your authority. 

Well, lah-day-freakin-dah.  Welcome to the United States of America.

(Pause for deep breath.) 

Anyhoo, at great taxpayer expense, and at the cost of hours and hours of staff time, our school district took “Anna Karenina” off the shelves.  Yep, Tolstoy got the ax.  So did Flannery O’Connor, a great Southern writer.  (Both were Christians, by the way, in the best sense of the word.)  And on and on.  Classics of American literature.  Popular, award-winning books, many of which have been made into TV shows and movies.  Books by LBGTQ+, Black and Indigenous writers.  All gone.  What’s left to read — “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm”? 

All of this directly conflicts with the school district’s stated goals:  “to improve… literacy outcomes, to inspire lifelong readers, to cultivate civic literacy and critical thinking.”  So thank you for that.

I wish the Collier County Public School district (CCPS) had stood up to y’all and said, “No.  Sex is part of life — and part of literature.  Exploring sexuality is part of life — and belongs on our shelves.  We’re not banning anything.  See you in court!”  But CCPS did not do this.  I guess Supt. Ricciardelli didn’t want any teachers going to jail as convicted felons.  Can’t say as I blame her.

But I do blame you, Gov. DeSantis, Florida Legislature and all your supporters.  You have cost us a ton of money and harmed our students immeasurably.  When they limp into college, their roommates will say, “You went to school in Southwest Florida?  Oh, man, I feel for you.  Do you want to borrow some books?”

I hope that some CCPS students will make a point of reading (in their spare time, unfortunately) many of the titles the school district has banned.  Will reading from this list improve their critical-thinking skills?  Yes, definitely.  It will boost their test scores, too, getting them into better colleges.  Most importantly, they’ll stand a better chance of becoming lifelong readers.

Melanie Meriwether Wicker, M.A.T.S., lives in Naples.  She has a master’s degree in theological studies from Moravian Theological Seminary in Bethlehem, PA and an undergraduate degree from Brown University.  She has worked as a children’s book editor, a magazine copywriter, a church music director, and a freelance writer.