Librarians Don't Deserve to be Dragged into Culture Wars

Naylor, Lori

Stevenson, S. (2021, November 23). Texas School Librarians don't deserve gov. Abbott dragging them into culture wars. Fort Worth Star-Telegram. https://www.yahoo.com/news/texas-school-librarians-don-t-162416559.html

    With the recent troubles for school libraries, where books such as Gender Queer and All Boys Aren’t Blue are not only being pulled from shelves but even right out of students’ hands, this article (by a former Texas middle school librarian) is an update on the troubles in Texas.

    Now the governor of Texas is threatening legal action against the librarians for “promoting pornographic materials.” This is despite the fact that none of the recently challenged books fit the state of Texas’ legal definition of pornography which is “any visual or written material that depicts lewd or sexual acts and is intended to cause sexual arousal.” The author notes that in the entire liberal Austin school district (which serves over 77,000 students) there are actually only four copies, for example, of Gender Queer, one of the books librarians are supposedly at fault for providing.

    As a former librarian, Stevenson is a voice of reason. She reminds readers that “the existence of a book in a library in no way signifies endorsement” by the librarian. Also, she acknowledges that librarians can make mistakes; they cannot, of course, read every book they put on the shelves. The article notes that “the government — in this case, a public school — cannot restrict speech because it does not agree with the content of that speech,” according to the Bill of Rights Institute. “The decisions called libraries places for ‘voluntary inquiry’ and concluded that the school board’s ‘absolute discretion’ over the classroom did not extend to the library for that reason.”