Book-Banning GOP Governor Wants You to Buy His Book

Por Stephanie Mencimer — Mother Jones Magazine

Utah Governor Spencer Cox has been making the rounds of national media recently promoting his new book, Off Ramp: How to be a peacemaker in an age of contempt. On Jon Stewart, CNBC, and CNN, Cox drilled down on a theme that brought him into the national spotlight last year after the assassination of conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk in Utah: political depolarization. This was nothing new for Cox, who launched a “disagree better” initiative as the head of the National Governor’s Association in 2023.

While the work has earned him national plaudits and calls to run for president, it hasn’t exactly endeared him to people at home. In Utah, the two-term governor is, in fact, rather polarizing. A new poll released on Tuesday shows that his net approval rating in Utah has fallen 23 points since April.

It’s not hard to see why. He has signed laws supporting extreme Republican gerrymandering and taking fluoride out of the drinking water. This year, he officially declared June as “Fidelity Month,” instead of its more familiar name, Pride Month. He has supported data center construction over the intense objections of Utah residents of all political stripes. And in 2024, the soon-to-be author signed one of the country’s most extreme book banning laws—a decision that’s now coming back to haunt him as he tries to get people to buy his own book.

Since the law’s passage, Utah has now banned 44 books from all of its public school libraries and AP class curricula—everything from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to popular books by Stephen King, Jodi Picoult and Sarah J. Maas. (The full list can be found here.) Some local school districts have banned three times that number, most of them because of LGBTQ-related content or what the book-banners like to call “pornography.” (An example: Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 midlife crisis book Eat Pray Love was challenged in the Davis County school district because, among other things, it “refers to a penis as a banana.” It survived after another reviewer pointed out that the author writes favorably about celibacy.)

I was in Utah when Cox’s book came out and thought I’d try to go see him talk about it while I was there. But the governor wasn’t doing any book events in his own state. I eventually saw him in DC, where he spoke last week at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Since I couldn’t find the governor in Utah, I went to see the legendary Salt Lake City bookstore owner Ken Sanders, proudly displays a sandwich board outside his store announcing, “We Buy Banned Books.” Born in Utah, Sanders has been selling books in the state since 1975, and he’s lived through various waves of state-sponsored censorship. I showed him a copy of Cox’s new book. When he saw the book jacket highlighting Cox’s “dedication to depolarization and a commitment to peacemaking,” he exclaimed, “Oof. That ain’t you, babe.”

“I would have to say he doesn’t understand irony at all,” Sanders said. “Or how would he title his book like that?”

Sanders isn’t the only Utah resident to notice the contradiction between the subject of Cox’s book and his support for the book banning law. In late April, The King’s English, a venerable independent bookstore in Salt Lake City, announced a promotion of the governor’s book, similar to those it does with other prominent authors. Customers who pre-ordered his book would receive a signed copy as soon as it came out. But the store was forced to cancel the offer in the face of furious outrage from its customers. “The book banner is partnering with a bookstore?” wrote one of hundreds of posters on the Salt Lake City sub-Reddit upset about Cox’s book promotion. “Gross and ill-advised.”

Cal Crosby, co-owner of The King’s English, says that the backlash was worse than when a bomb threat in 2023 forced them to cancel drag queen story time. The bomb threat turned out to have come from somewhere overseas, but the attacks over Cox’s book came from close to home. “It was very personal,” he said, noting that many of the most aggressive critics were among the store’s longtime customers or business connections.

Utah’s book banning law , according to critics, has a sweeping mandate. Here’s how it works: If three school districts, or two districts and five charter schools, ban a book because they decide it meets the state definition of obscenity or “sensitive materials,” the book is automatically removed from every school in the state. A Salt Lake Tribune analysis in May found that almost all of the statewide book bans originated in only two of the state’s 41 school districts.

Of those nine, most of the bans initially originated from just one district: Davis County, a conservative area north of Salt Lake City, where fringe conservatives have taken over the local Republican party. In 2021, after a two-year investigation, the US Department of Justice forced the Davis school district to address widespread racial harassment against Black and Asian-American students. Shortly afterward, a 10-year-old Black girl with autism died by suicide after allegedly suffering from intense bullying in a Davis County school.

Yet Davis County activists are leveraging the book-banning law to dictate what every school in the state is allowed to teach or stock in its library. And once the state bans a book, it can’t be assigned, even for AP classes. And schools must destroy all their copies lest the offending materials make their way into a Little Library or the hands of an unsuspecting youth.

Cox signed the first version of a book banning law in 2022 that allowed individual school districts to ban books. After it passed, a small but motivated army of people aligned with the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty marched into local schools to scan the bookshelves for books they deemed smutty. The law required school districts have committees to review book challenges, and people without children in the district schools were ineligible to challenge reading materials.

But state records showed that those rules have been routinely ignored, according to an investigation by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project. In Washington County in Southern Utah, for instance, most book challenges were made almost entirely by a woman who homeschooled her kids.

In 2024, when the state legislature expanded the law to make it easier to ban books statewide, Utah education advocates and civil liberties groups called on Cox to veto the bill. If enacted, they argued, the law “would encourage individuals to stifle the voices of diverse authors and perspectives, casting a chilling shadow over the sanctity of our First Amendment rights.”

Cox signed it anyway.

“I think calling on people to depolarize and to tone down the rhetoric is a very good thing to do,” says Jessica Horton, co-founder of Let Davis Read, an advocacy group fighting book bans in Davis County. “But as a leader, sometimes you have to stand up to your friends and say, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is not okay.’  And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s always the case with our governor.”

When I reached out to Cox’s publisher for a comment on his support for the book banning law, a spokesperson said in an email that the governor had no role in removing books from schools. The spokesperson disputed the idea that Utah was banning books, saying that local leaders and librarians have always chosen age-appropriate books for their schools. “We’re not going to agree on every policy, including which books should be available to children in public schools,” they said. “And refusing to engage with people we disagree with is a big part of how we got to our current political environment.”

Authors whose work has been banned, the estate of Kurt Vonnegut, as well as several students have sued the state over the law. Represented by the ACLU, they have argued that, among other things, it is depriving young people of constitutionally protected literature and personally harming the authors. On September 15, a federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs have standing to sue and the case is moving forward.

Meanwhile, Cox has been promoting his book, and a state literacy effort, as if none of this ever happened. “Civilization cannot continue if we can’t read,” he said at an event in August. He even retweeted a recent Atlantic story heralding the death of literacy, calling it “sobering.”

“With one hand, he is saying, ‘I want children to learn to read.’ With the other hand, he is taking away the books that teens actually want to read,” such as Stephen King novels, notes Susan Heiner, an organizer of Let Utah Read, which has been fighting the book bans. “You get kids and teenagers to read by giving them things that they are interested in.”

Fonte: Mother Jones Magazine