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Officials within Colorado’s Elizabeth School District removed eighteen books from school library shelves and marked another as “temporarily suspended,” claiming to protect children from inappropriate content and to guard parental authority.

But if you look at the facts surrounding the case and at the books themselves, it becomes obvious that the district targeted these particular books at the behest of ideologues largely to “protect” children from content ideologically at odds with the views of those making the complaints. Thus, the decision to remove the books is exactly the sort of “cancel culture” and government-imposed orthodoxy (the district is a governmental entity) that most conservatives say they oppose in other contexts.

I decided to do what those who removed the books largely declined to do and read all eighteen books (plus two others), cover to cover. Most of the books I borrowed from the Jefferson County library; one I purchased used. As of my submission of this column, I’ve read only a few of the books. I will read the rest and post notes and study guides on my website. I intend this material to serve, among other things, as a resource for people wanting to start a book club for banned or suppressed books.

I also invited my wife and ten-year-old son to read any of the books. One of the books the district removed was Rebecca Felix’s nonfiction work, “# Pride: Championing LGBTQ Rights,” a 32-page history of the LGBTQ movement. I read Felix’s book aloud to my family, and we discussed it and looked up aspects of its history, such as Ellen DeGeneres’s 1997 TV clip of her character coming out as gay before she herself came out as gay.

According to the original document from the district (republished by Denver 7), the focus was on “materials … determined to be inappropriate based on age level, flags, or lacking educational merit.” There’s nothing remotely inappropriate about Felix’s book for any age reader. As a short history of the LGBTQ movement, clearly it has educational merit. Obviously the district removed this book because of its ideological bent, although district officials deny that.

Lessons from Morrison

To be sure, most of the books contain challenging content. I’d never before read Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel “The Bluest Eye”, once available through Elizabeth High School, and I found it emotionally devastating.

It’s about a young Black girl, a little older than my son, who so internalizes racial self-loathing that she wishes for blue eyes so she can be pretty, especially after her father brutally rapes her. More generally, the book is about all the people in this girl’s life who completely fail her.

It is one of the hardest books I have ever read, and I am so glad that I read it, because it is beautifully written despite its horror and such a well-polished mirror held up to certain pathologies in our culture. I quickly saw why this book contributed to Morrison receiving the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993.

Children do not need to be protected from Toni Morrison’s books. They need to be protected from the horrors that Morrison describes. And reading her books is a good way to help build that protection. Children learn to navigate the world by learning about the world, not by their parents or school officials shoving their heads in the sands. Although my son declined to read this book based on my description, he has my permission — indeed, my enthusiastic encouragement — to read it whenever he feels he’s ready for it.

“The Bluest Eye” is, in a way, a strange book for conservatives to banish, because it has a strong Christian theme (although I don’t know if Morrison would describe it that way). The basic theme of the book is that the little girl, named Pecola (after a movie character), has moral worth, even if others don’t recognize her worth, even if she does not recognize her own worth. The book is an agonized cry, ‘See this girl!’ “Let the children come to me!” “Just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me!”

Morrison’s book also can be read as compatible with pro-life ideas (although, again, I don’t know if Morrison would see it that way). The two sisters in the book, among the very few people in the world who care about Pecola, feel horrible about the hatred directed toward Pecola’s unborn child (the product of a rape). One of the girls says to herself, “I thought about the baby that everybody wanted dead. … I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live” (p. 190 of the 1993 Knopf edition).

Another oddity about conservatives suppressing this book is the fact that Morrison, like many Colorado conservatives, is extremely interested in exposing the horror of sexual abuse of children. Pecola’s father rapes her, and two other men in the book sexually assault children. Recently, Republican legislators joined with Democrats to stiffen penalties for child sex trafficking, and a conservative group supports a ballot measure calling for life in prison for trafficking of minors (although, as I’ve argued, that measure has some serious problems).

Several scenes of Morrison’s book illustrate in small ways the trouble with ignorance. At one point, the girls discuss menstruation and pregnancy and get the biology of it totally wrong. In another scene, the girls think that, when adults describe a girl as “ruined,” they’re talking about her getting fat. Again: You don’t protect children by hiding from them the facts of life and even the potential horrors of life.

That is not to say that young children are ready for this particular book — it was pulled from high school shelves and not available in the elementary or middle school libraries — but certainly older children can handle it, preferably in discussion with caring and thoughtful adults.

Background Facts

In her August 5, 2024, document, “Request for Board Action,” on the subject, “Library Sensitive Topic Protocol and Book Lists,” Elizabeth School District Chief Academic Officer Kim Moore discussed the findings of the district’s Board Curriculum Review Committee, described proposals for identifying sensitive books, and proposed that certain books be listed as sensitive or pulled from school library shelves.

The list of “sensitive topic” books included the following titles (among many others), with the idea that sensitive titles should be subject to parental permission (I’ve corrected some typos; for example, the district document misspelled “cuckoo’s nest” as “cukoo’s nest”):

  • “1984” by George Orwell
  • “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess
  • “The Diary of a Young Girl”by Anne Frank
  • “Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out” by Susan Kuklin
  • “Buddhism” by Winston King
  • “The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger
  • “Critical Perspectives on Islam and the Western World” by Jonathan Johansen
  • “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card
  • “Hinduism” by Gregory Kozlowski
  • “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou
  • “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey
  • “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut 
  • “The Book of Mormon”
  • “The Bible”
  • “The Koran”
  • “The Giver” by Lois Lowry
  • “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood
  • “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins
  • “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee

The August 5 document also listed nineteen books as “temporarily suspended” (again with typos cleaned up):

  • “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas
  • “Thirteen Reasons Why” by Jay Asher
  • “# Pride: Championing LGBTQ Rights” by Rebecca Felix
  • “You Should See Me in a Crown” by Leah Johnson
  • “It’s Your World—If You Don’t Like It, Change It” by Mikki Halpin
  • “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini
  • “Beloved” by Toni Morrison
  • “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison
  • “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky
  • “Looking for Alaska” by John Green
  • “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult
  • “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson
  • “Identical” by Ellen Hopkins
  • “Fallout” by Ellen Hopkins
  • “Glass” by Ellen Hopkins
  • “Burned” by Ellen Hopkins
  • “Crank” by Ellen Hopkins
  • “Smoke” by Ellen Hopkins
  • “George”, republished in 2021 as “Melissa” by Alex Gino

The ACLU sued in U.S. District Court over the school district’s suppression of books. In its complaint dated December 19, 2024, the ACLU summarized:

In Summer of 2024, the Elizabeth School District … began a quest to limit students’ access to any books that contravene the Board members’ partisan, political values.

The Board appointed a committee to review all of the books in ESD [Elizabeth School District] libraries and create a list of books containing “sensitive topics,” such as “racism/discrimination,” “religious viewpoints,” “sexual content,” “profanity/obscenity,” “graphic violence,” and “ideations of self-harm or mental illness.” Per Board policy, a book’s inclusion on this “Sensitive List” means that, any time a student checks it out, their parents receive an email that their child checked out the book. Parents can also choose to prohibit their children from checking out all books on the Sensitive List.

Of the dozens of books on the Sensitive List, the committee identified 19 books that they believed were more sensitive than the rest. These books were primarily by or about people of color and/or LGBTQ+ people. . . .

Defendant District, through its Board, decided that all of those books should be “temporarily suspended” from ESD libraries and put on display at the Board’s office so that parents could review passages in the books flagged as objectionable and weigh in on whether the books should be returned to ESD libraries.

On September 9, 2024, the Board announced its decision to permanently banish all “temporarily suspended” books from ESD libraries instead of returning them. …

The Board has also quietly removed at least one other book from ESD libraries in response to a parent’s complaint. The Board removed K.A. Holt’s Redwood and Ponytail from Running Creek Elementary’s library because it is about two girls who develop feelings for each other.

The Board’s removal of these books … runs afoul of the federal and state constitutions. It denies students access to books in their school libraries because of the ideas contained in those books and denies authors the right to share their books with ESD students free from viewpoint-based censorship.

An endnote clarifies that “one of the books, Speak by Laurie Anderson, had been checked out but never returned to the Elizabeth High School Library.”

In a June 7 email, Elizabeth Superintendent Dan Snowberger said of the ACLU’s claim regarding Holt’s book, “They are incorrect. Redwood and Ponytail was never removed. A parent had expressed a concern about it after the original 18 books were removed. The curriculum review committee never had the opportunity to review it due to the filing of the lawsuit.” I’ll add that book to my reading list regardless. (Note: Snowberger recently announced his retirement.)

Okay, so did anyone from the district, or any parent complaining about the books in question, actually read any of them? The ACLU’s document dated February 3, 2025, “Defendant’s Answer to Complaint,” makes the following claims:

Those reviewing the books often did not read the entire book, but instead read short segments that Internet sources had labeled controversial. Books were often added to the Sensitive List solely because a member of the BCRC took issue with an isolated passage in the book.

Response (from the same legal document):

The three reviewers from the Curriculum Committee did not have time to read the entirety of each title they considered for potential inclusion on the Sensitive Topics List or for potential removal from a district library. … Reviewers therefore relied on one or more of the third-party resources identified in the Library Protocols and their independent research, in addition to sometimes reading significant portions of the work itself, to assist their review.

ACLU:

Board members did not read each book in full before deciding to remove them from ESD libraries.

Response:

Four School Board members voted at the September 9, 2024 meeting to permanently remove the 18 titles that had been available for public review. [We] admit that each of those members did not read each of the 18 titles in full before voting on September 9, although some members read significant parts of some of the 18 titles. School board members who read parts of books varied in which books they read and how much of each book they read.

On March 19, 2025, the District Court issued a preliminary injunction and ordered the district “to immediately return the books to the library shelves.” The next day, the school district appealed. But later the district asked for the appeal to be dismissed. On January 21, 2026, the appeals court granted the dismissal while complaining, “Appellant’s filing of the Motion only days before the scheduled argument is not well-taken.”

What does this mean? As the ACLU explains in a January 23 media release, “After ESD abandoned its appeal, the case now returns to the district court where it will proceed to trial.”

Continued Discussion

The case continues to generate public discussion. In a May 22 blog post, 850 KOA radio host Mandy Connell characterized the district’s efforts this way: “Elizabeth Schools Is Fighting For Kids” and “protecting a process that works for the community when it comes to books.”

The same day, Connell hosted Elizabeth Superintendent Dan Snowberger to discuss the matter. Snowberger characterized the suppression of books as a matter of “local control.” And never mind the rights of those in the district who did not support the removal of books. Again, we are talking about government-run schools subject to Constitutional constraints. Snowberger did say that parents retained the ability to independently provide copies of the books in question to their children, who then could bring the books to school. Snowberger also pointed out that at least some of the books in question never had been checked out, and he said that other books on LGBTQ issues remain on shelves.

Snowberger also referred to a 2025 Fifth Circuit decision finding that a public library may remove books because there is no “right to receive information from the government in the form of taxpayer-funded library books.” I agree with the court about that, but I note that there is a huge difference between a library declining to purchase a particular book and a government-run library going out of its way to remove for ideological reasons some book already on the shelves. We’ll see where the Elizabeth case goes following the Tenth Circuit trial; Snowberger suggested it may head to the Supreme Court.

Snowberger also appealed for funds for the district’s legal team and said that the Rocky Mountain Voice is helping the district’s legal team raise funds. Sure enough, a district page states, “Are you interested in helping Elizabeth School District in its ongoing legal battle with the ACLU?” It offers a payment link associated with Rocky Mountain Voice and says that “checks can be made payable to Rocky Mountain Voice.”

That “unabashedly right-of-center” publication was founded by failed Republican candidate for governor Heidi Ganahl, most infamous for her obsession with “furries” in schools. Rocky Mountain Voice also is running “Freedom Festival 2026” later this month, featuring, as Jamie O’Rourke summarizes, “national conservative media figures, many of whom have built careers pushing misinformation and conspiracy theories.” Partnering with Rocky Mountain Voice hardly helps Snowberger’s claims that the books were not removed for ideological reasons!

As for Connell, she said, “Little children don’t need to see graphic depictions of sexual content,” ignoring that Felix’s book contains no such depictions, that the only book pulled from elementary shelves contain no such depictions (and neither does Holt’s book), and that most of the books in question were pulled from the high school library.

Here is my challenge to Snowberger, Connell, and everyone else involved in suppressing these books or supporting their suppression: Join me in actually reading the books. Let’s do an online book club. Suppressing books that you can’t even be bothered to read is the coward’s path.

I asked Snowberger how many of the books he’s read and he didn’t say. Connell said on the radio, “I’ve read most of the books that are on this list, or at least seen enough from the books on this list to know what they’re about.” She added, “I’m telling you, some of these books have genuinely pornographic content in them.” Not all of the books have sexually explicit content, and it’s absurd to suggest that sexually explicit content is the same as pornography.

Connell did not comment on the Bible, which made the “sensitive” list but not the “suspended” list, which contains the following passages:

“She prostituted herself in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of stallions.”

“The man seized his concubine and put her out to them. They wantonly raped her and abused her all through the night until the morning. . . . He took a knife, and grasping his concubine he cut her into twelve pieces, limb by limb, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel.”

“Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.”

Which books made the suppression list seems to be a matter of double standards.

Meanwhile, as the latest results from the Colorado Measures of Academic Success reveal, the problem is not that students are reading too many “sensitive” books. The problem is that in many cases they are not reading much at all, and that in some cases they lack the ability to read complex books. Don’t school districts have better things to do than suppress books, like maybe teach kids how to read and understand them?