Steve Martin is “proud” his novel has been banned in one Florida county

Actor Steve Martin was delighted to discover that his 2000 novel was banned in one Florida county.

“So proud to have my book Shopgirl banned in Collier County, Florida!” the Only Murders in the Building star wrote in an Instagram post on Tuesday. “Now people who want to read it will have to buy a copy!”

Related:

Florida school removed Bible from shelves over “sexually explicit content”

The Bible contains passages about naked people, drunken incest, and one sex worker who compares her well-endowed male lovers to donkeys.

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Shopgirl was one of over 300 books pulled from shelves by the Collier County Public School District recently. According to local NBC affiliate WBBH, the books were removed under Florida’s HB 1069.

Signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in May, the law is an expansion of the state’s infamous Parental Rights in Education Act, commonly known as the Don’t Say Gay law. In addition to expanding the anti-LGBTQ+ law’s ban on discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity to all grade school levels, HB 1069 broadened school board oversight of library collections, allows Florida parents to challenge any books in school libraries, requires contested titles to be pulled from shelves for review, and specifies that content that “depicts or describes sexual conduct” can be challenged.

As Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education programs at PEN America, noted during a recent hearing on book bans before the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education, book challenges in schools and public libraries across the country have largely targeted works by Black and LGBTQ+ authors that deal with themes of race and LGBTQ+ issues.

Alongside Martin’s slim romantic comedy about a heterosexual love triangle, Collier County’s list included plenty of LGBTQ+ and LGBTQ+-adjacent books. Becky Albertalli’s young adult novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, the basis for the 2018 film Love, Simon; Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End; David Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing; and The ABCs of LGBT+ by Ashley Mardell were all on the list, along with Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and several novels by Anne Rice.

Multiple books by Toni Morrison, Stephen King, John Updike, Jodi Picoult, and others were also on the list. Collier County has also banned an alarming number of literary classics that have been mainstays in school libraries for decades. PEN America notes that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World appear on the list alongside books by T.H. White, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O’Connor, Norman Mailer, Zora Neale Hurston, Alexandre Dumas, and even Ayn Rand.

While Martin laughed off his novel’s banning, Collier County Public Schools parent Amy Perwien told WBBH that she was “shocked” at the number of books on the list, describing many as classics that students should be able to access.

“Ignorance doesn’t protect innocence,” Perwien said. “So, we are not protecting our children’s innocence by restricting them. We are just making them uneducated.”