‘Access equals equity’: Anti-censorship advocates fear new book ban’s impact – Columbia Missourian

When Kai Freter heard about Senate Bill 775, a law that requires the removal of some books in Missouri schools, they and their mom, Carol Sattler, went to the Daniel Boone Regional Library to look for books that had become targets for removal.

The new Missouri law focuses on protecting victims of sexual assault. But it includes an amendment to a previous law that now bans any visual materials containing “sexually explicit” content in schools — specifically, any visual depiction, from photographic to computer-generated images, that depicts sexual acts or human genitals. The law excludes works of art “when taken as a whole,” that have serious artistic or anthropological significance or are used in science courses.