Pink plans to distribute 2,000 free copies of banned books at Florida gig

Pink is planning to distribute 2,000 free copies of banned books at her upcoming Florida gig.

The outspoken Grammy-winner, 44, who has been blisteringly honest about everything from her drug use history to her support for women's access to abortions, said she will hand out tomes barred in the state's schools when she plays the state this week.

Pink said: "Books have held a special joy for me from the time I was a child. That's why I am unwilling to stand by and watch while books are banned by schools."

Florida has become the centre of the book-banning debate and Pink's plan has been formed with the national free speech group Pen America.

They have chosen four titles to give away to fans — Toni Morrison's Beloved, Todd Parr's The Family Book, Stacia Deutsch's Girls who Code and the poem recited by Amanda Gorman at Joe Biden's presidential inauguration in January 2021 titled The Hill we Climb.

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Pen America's database of censored tomes lodged 3,362 book bans in US public schools in the 2022 to 2023 school year.

Of those more than 40 per cent — the equivalent of 1,406 book-ban cases — happened in Florida school districts.

The state's Republican governor Ron DeSantis, 44, oversaw a bill he signed into law in 2022 called the Parental Rights in Education Act.

Commonly known as the Don't Say Gay rule it prohibits elementary schools from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity.

In June 2022, mum-of-two Pink — born Alecia Beth Moore — slammed fans of hers who "believe the government belongs in a woman's uterus" and ordered them to stop listening to her music.

She made the statement after the US Supreme Court ruled to overturn the historic Roe v Wade decision, which had legalised abortions across the US since 1973.

The Republican-controlled Supreme Court ruled on June 24, 2022 in favour of a Mississippi law that outlaws abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy — while also overturning key precedents established by the 1973 decision in Roe v Wade as well as an affirming decision in 1992's Planned Parenthood v Casey.

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