Dictionaries explain the meanings of words that Florida's Escambia County School District does not want students to learn.
The Escambia County School District has removed thousands of books from its library shelves in keeping with Florida's new restrictive book-banning law, HB 1069. Included in the list of books are several dictionaries. Dictionaries have words in them, and the Mom's for Liberty folks can't tolerate that. Next up is probably the alphabet, so Florida doesn't have to worry about people reading at all.
At the completion of that process, more than 2800 books were removed from libraries. (This includes, in some cases, multiple copies of the same book.) These books are being reviewed again by the school district. But that process is proceeding extremely slowly. According to a list maintained by the Escambia County School District, fewer than 100 texts have gone through the final review process. Many of these books remain unavailable to students absent a parental "opt-in."
The dictionaries, according to the school district's data, remain locked away. Their exclusion demonstrates the preposterously broad language of HB 1069. Dictionaries do contain descriptions of "sexual conduct." Merriam-Webster, for example, defines sex as a "sexual union involving penetration of the vagina by the penis" or "intercourse (such as anal or oral intercourse) that does not involve penetration of the vagina by the penis." But the idea that we need to exclude dictionaries from schools to protect children defies all logic.
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Apparently, The Guinness Book of World Records and Ripley's Believe It Or Not have also been banned by the district.
