Palmetto Examiner examines
what kind of books are being removed. The results are shocking, disturbing and in
the gutter dirty and inappropriate
 |
U.S. House Rep. James D. Clyburn, (D) SC-6, introduces
California Gov.
Gavin Newsom to Kershaw County democrats
on July 8. Newsom was on a two-day
tour across the
Palmetto State hosted by the South Carolina Democrat Party
|
Written by Tony J. Spain, Palmetto Examiner
July 19, 2025
“South
Carolina is leading the nation in banning books,” U.S. House Rep. James
Clyburn, (D) SC-6 said
last week while introducing California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom to a
crowd in Kershaw County during a two-day visit covering eight counties in rural
areas that lean red in the Palmetto State.
“This state leads the nation in banning books. You have a superintendent of
education banning books on Rosa Parks. Banning books on Martin Luther King Jr,”
claimed Clyburn.
Newsom followed up on the issue of book bans saying he was “struck by” what the
congressman said about the “book bans” and “it was emblematic about the moment
we are in.”
“Last year there were 4,240 books banned in the United States of America. You
can look that up,” said Newsom. “It was a banning binge to the likes we’ve
never experienced in the United States. There has been a cultural purge in this
country. The congressman was exactly right. They tried to write out the race of
Rosa Parks.”
I didn’t look up how many books were banned in the United States. I’ll take
Gavin’s word on it, although I shouldn’t. I did look up how many books have
been removed or restricted from South Carolina public school libraries, and it
is true. South Carolina does lead the nation with 21 books removed and one with
restrictions, but not one for the reasons of being about the life or race of
Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr.
Palmetto Examiner found no evidence that South Carolina has removed or
restricted any books about the life of Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. So,
what kind of books did we find are being removed? That answer is dirty and
filthy.
Only sexually graphic, age-inappropriate material has been removed or restricted.
And we’re not talking about the dirty romance novel some lonely wives read, or
a stack of Playboys hidden in your friend’s dad’s garage. No, we’re talking
stuff so far in the gutter of filth it would make Hugh Heffner turn 50 shades
of red.
Below is a list of the 22 books removed or restricted by the South Carolina
Board of Education. In its content you will find written material so sexually explicit,
I can’t say it on the radio, or prime time television due to FCC rules on
decency or even allowed on YouTube for the same reasons. In fact, Lexington Richland
5 school board members voted to have
the audio redacted from their YouTube channel due to explicit content when
parents read from the books at a board meeting. Graphic descriptions and
emotional details of violent gang rapes, gay incest, oral sex, anal sex, sex
with minors and teenage, heterosexual, lesbian and or gay sex with vivid descriptions
of the fondling and kissing of breasts, genitalia and masturbation are not
allowed to be read out loud on a school board’s YouTube channel, but it’s ok to
be in the library for students to read.
The descriptions in these books are so graphic I will not re-write them here
for you to read. I will provide the link to the South Carolina Board of
Education’s Instructional Material Complaint Reports (IMCRs) with excerpts from
said books that you can read for yourself and make your own judgement if you
choose to, but you have been warned. No one should be reading this filth in my
opinion, especially children. There’s a good reason we don’t allow children to
look at pornography, watch R rated or adult movies; we shouldn’t let them read
it either. It robs them of their innocence, corrupts their minds.
Here are the books with links to the South Carolina Board of Education’s IMRCs
with excerpts from the books and page numbers. Read them at your own risk.
Push
by Sapphire
The
Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Empire
of Storms by Sarah J. Maas
Half
of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Hopeless
by Colleen Hoover
Identical
by Ellen Hopkins
Kingdom
of Ash by Sarah J. Mass
Last
Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
Living
Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott
Lucky
by Alice Sebold
Tricks
by Ellen Hopkins
Damsel
by Elana Arnold
Flamer
by Mike Curato
Ugly
Love by Colleen Hoover
All
Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
Collateral
by Ellen Hopkins
A
Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J. Maas
A
Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Mass
A
Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Mass
A
Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Mass
Normal
People by Sally Rooney
Crank
by Ellen Hopkins: This book didn’t meet the criteria of explicit sexual
material and was not removed, but was determined to have themes of drug abuse and
was restricted to high school students.
While reading these IMCRs, there was a name that kept showing up as the filer
of the complaint, Elizabeth “Ivie” Szalai, a Beaufort resident and concerned
parent of a student.
Like
many parents, Szalai, started paying more attention and getting involved in
their children’s schools during the COVID-19 pandemic and virtual online
learning and stayed engaged after.
“I kept seeing on social media these books that were being found in public
schools available to children and I kind of looked into it and found oh my gosh
that really shouldn’t be available to minors,” Szalai told Palmetto Examiner.
She was then asked by a friend to see if her local school library had any of
the books in question and she started researching.
“I really went down the rabbit hole,” she said. “I found 96 books that were,
not all of them were sexually explicit, but all of them had questionable adult
content that maybe wouldn’t be the right thing to expose to minors.”
In October 2022, Szalai sent her findings to the Chief Instructional Services Officer
and the Beaufort County School Board citing morality and decency laws she felt
were in violation. In a panic, the Beaufort County School Board removed all 96
books from the school library shelves for review and that’s when the firestorm
started.
It was never Szalai’s intention to create a firestorm of controversy or media
frenzy for notoriety. She just wanted to bring awareness to the improper
material in hopes it would be removed from schools.
“I hoped
they didn’t realize this material was in there, and they were going to take a
look at the list and kind of cross reference and look at the passages and be
like you know what, this really isn’t appropriate to be making available to
minors, Szalai told Palmetto Examiner. “I never in a million years thought it
would turn into what it has turned into. I just wanted to do that work, get the
books gone and move on to my next project.”
A process you would have thought would be simple and
met with common sense to remove inappropriate graphically described sexual
material, was met with push back, criticism and attacks. The review process
took a full year in half. A group called FABB, Families Against Banning
Books, was formed. A student activist group was organized, DAYLO, Diversity Awareness
Youth Literacy Organization, and with the help of the American Civil Liberty Union of South Carolina,
went on the attack defending these books, claiming the right for them to be
read by students and since some of the books in question were written by
minority authors and or had themes related to the LBGTQ+ community, it was now
being portrayed as a civil rights issue and Szalai now found herself exactly
where she didn’t want to be, in the middle of it.
“I’ve been called all kinds of things. It’s been very interesting. “I’ve been
painted as this person who is a racist, I’m a nazi, I’m a misogynist,” she said.
“They’ve painted this picture that I’m trying to marginalize minorities meaning
blacks, Hispanics, LBGTQ, and I don’t care what race, creed, color, religion
you are. If it’s sexually explicit it’s sexually explicit. Even if it’s between
a man and a woman if it’s sexually explicit then I want that book removed also.”
 |
Elizabeth
“Ivie” Szalai says she has been harassed and called
names like in the comments
above on social media since she
started working to have books with
inappropriate sexually explicit
material reviewed and removed from public
school libraries. The
South Carolina Board of Education removed 22 books from
their
libraries the most in the nation. |
Interestingly,
groups like the ACLU, FABB and others who continue to fight for these books to
remain in school libraries rarely ever make it about the explicit sexual
material in the books, but frame the argument as minorities being marginalized or
the protection of rights and the freedom for students to be able to read
whatever book they want.
FABB claims on their own website
their mission is to “advocate for intellectual freedom, champion educators and
librarians, and promote socially just and public education.”
Melinda Henrickson, who founded FABB with other moms and parents, and then ran
for South Carolina House District 124 admitted
during the campaign it’s not about the books.
“It was never about the books,” Henrickson said. “It was about marginalizing minority
groups and silencing black and brown authors and people in the LBGTQ community.”
And so, the sexually explicit and inappropriate material is irrelevant if
someone is being marginalized and teens should be left unchecked to have the
freedom to read whatever they want? Why do other media platforms and products
like movies and television shows have ratings to protect underage children from
the very content we’re allowing them to read, why would books be different?
“We do it with music. We do it with video games, why are books different?
Szalai asks. “It makes absolutely no sense to me.”
Also these groups in opposition of the efforts to remove inappropriate sexual
material from public school libraries have made the argument such classic books
like “1984” by George Orwell or “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger have similar
references to sexual material, but Szalai says there is a descriptive difference.
“You can read a passage about a woman and a woman, and you can say that they
had sex, they made love. She kissed her down her neck and every area of her
body, but it doesn’t conjure up in the mind the same visual depiction as if you
are saying she was sucking on her left breast nipple and kissed her down her
belly to her nether regions and fireworks were exploding. There are different
levels,” Szalai said. “You can describe and say someone is having sex without
it being so descriptive. It really depends on the descriptiveness of the
passage. The classics don’t go into that full description of the act. The act
happens and it might be a little bit racy, but it’s not full on describing the
act.”
As far as Clyburn’s claim that South Carolina superintendent of education,
Ellen Weaver, is banning books about Rosa Parks, Szalai would like to see the
evidence of that.
“I’m absolutely flabbergasted, because I don’t know if he is just misinformed
or just flat out lying. When I first saw it, I was just at a loss of words,” Szalai
said. “I want him to present facts and if he can’t present them. I want a
public apology to Weaver.”
The only books Palmetto Examiner found that have been
removed from public school libraries in South Carolina are the ones listed in
this story. They have been able to be removed because of complaints from parents
allowed under
a South Carolina law, Regulation 43-170, which passed July 26, 2024 after
Weaver recognized
pornographic material had been found in South Carolina public school libraries
and made and kept her campaign promise to push for such a regulation to
create a uniform process for local school boards to review and hold public
hearings on complaints raised within its districts, establishing an appellate process
to the SBE.
Weaver makes no apologies about removing inappropriate sexually explicit
materials out of South Carolina schools and said there’s a big difference
between banning books and removing pornographic material out of schools while
speaking to the Steel Magnolias Republican Women’s Club at Southbound
Smokehouse in North Augusta earlier this year.
“We are not banning books,” Weaver went on to say. “And I can tell you I will
never apologize for standing up for the innocence of our children,”
Yes, Mr. Clyburn, South Carolina does lead the nation in removing books, but
not historic books about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. We’re moving filthy
written pornographic books out of public schools, why won’t you join us or at
least tell the truth about it?
Palmetto Examiner did reach out to Congressman James Clyburn’s office, but received
no response on this issue.
**********About the Author:
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Tony Spain is a former candidate for
Richland County Council 2020 and an award winning former military photographer
and journalist while in the Public Affairs Office for the U.S. Army. His photos
and writing have been published in numerous publications such as The Commercial
News, Danville, Ill.; The Paraglide, Fort Bragg, N.C.; Soldier of Fortune
Magazine; The State Newspaper, Columbia, S.C., and more.
He lives in
Columbia, S.C.
**********
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