Some of Steven Kings's books have hard X rated elements. There are pages of graphic violent sexual acts that aren't necessary to the story but written because King admitted he was blacked out on cocaine at the time. Those don't belong in schools.

is it not super dodgy for a state to decide what can & can't be read in schools, rather than the school's librarian..?

there are some books on that list that i don't think are suitable for under 18s, but surely at the state level, there are bigger things to worry about than kids reading age-inappropriate books

Stephen writes for the lowest common denominator.

It's even worse than that, if I'm reading the article correctly:

In Utah, the law requires that a book be removed from all public schools in the state if at least three school districts (or at least two school districts and five charter schools) determine it amounts to “objective sensitive material”

It's not hard to get books banned in charter schools, since they're privately run and can be extremely biased. So they only need TWO districts run by bigots to get nearly anything banned. Utah has 41 districts in the state, so the law is that under 5% of public school superintendents decide what's acceptable for the entire state.

The 1982 collection, called “Different Seasons,” features the following four novellas:

“Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: Hope Springs Eternal”
“Apt Pupil: Summer of Corruption”
“The Body: Fall from Innocence”
“The Breathing Method: A Winter’s Tale”

Saves you a click. Also they didn’t ban IT, in which an 11 year old girl pulls a train. Or The Vision by Dean Koontz in which a 9 year old boy SA’s his 6 year old sister with a bat — the kind with wings, that is.

In other words, they really aren’t talking about shit. Or they don’t know shit.

IMO King and Koontz books don’t belong in school libraries. You should be able to buy them, though.

Wouldn't that also work the other way? Or is the other side the only one playing by the rules and doing what's right for the kids?

It should be trivial to get a few districts to ban the Bible. There's a ton of material that is objectively bad for kids.

I don't know what happened after this, but one district had at least a partial ban in place at one point.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bible-ban-utah-school-district-elementary-middle-complaint-sex-book/