At the Texas Capitol recently, I was among a group of librarians, parents, and others who testified—many of us after waiting more than ten hours—to the Texas House Committee on State Affairs in opposition to House Bill 3225.
As the Texas Freedom to Read Project has summarized, HB 3225 would: “Ban anyone under 18 from accessing ‘sexually explicit’ materials—a term so broadly defined that it includes books with any descriptions of ‘sexual conduct,’ regardless of context or intent.” It would also: “Prevent libraries from curating or displaying many important books in teen and children’s sections, including sex-education materials, young adult novels, and even classic literature and art books.” And it would “restrict youth from accessing the general collection—even for school assignments or research—potentially blocking students from reading The Great Gatsby, The Color Purple, or Beloved.”
I’m a Texas author and I serve as vice president of the Texas Institute of Letters, a literary honor society founded in 1936. One of our most celebrated members was Larry McMurtry, author of the classic novel Lonesome Dove—one of innumerable books that could be rendered off-limits to a big swath of the reading public if this ridiculous bill becomes law and libraries are forced to segregate their books and spaces—or risk fines and other consequences.
I read Lonesome Dove when I was 17, freshly inspired by the 1989 TV miniseries. The book opened my eyes to the fact that great literature was being created in—and could be written by residents of—the Lone Star State. While my literary career has gone in a different direction than McMurtry’s (my best-known work of fiction is a picture book called Shark vs. Train), thanks to his example I’ve never once doubted the compatibility of being a writer and being a Texan.
In Lonesome Dove, retired Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call lead a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana, a scant plot summary that neither conveys the high regard in which many Texans hold this novel nor does justice to the book’s considerable literary merit. But under pro-censorship HB 3225, Lonesome Dove’s merit is of no importance. All that matters is that in its 800-plus pages, Gus McCrae makes a few earthy references to sex. “Poke” and “carrot” are the euphemisms he uses.
Filed by state Representative Daniel Alders, a Republican from Tyler, with dozens of GOP co-authors, HB 3225 states that “A municipal public library may not maintain sexually explicit material”—defined as anything “that describes, depicts, or portrays sexual conduct”—anywhere that anyone under age 18 has access to. It’s an attempt to keep information and ideas about sex and gender out of the heads of as many Texans as possible, no matter the collateral damage.
Under anti-free-speech HB 3225, those occasional pokes and carrots might have been enough to keep the library of my little Texas hometown from allowing me access to that book. Or, rather than reshelve that book and anything else that a busybody might declare “explicit,” maybe my library would have denied me access to the entire adult section. Or, as one Idaho library briefly did last year under a draconian state law, maybe it would have barred me from the library itself—as a way to avoid a potential $10,000 penalty for enabling a young patron’s intellectual curiosity.
If you think this anti-library HB 3225 wouldn’t have that effect—that no one would try to interpret this book ban so strictly—restricting book access is its purpose. Approving this bill would do a disservice to the families who value their own children’s curiosity and education, including their kids’ ability to access books needed for assigned reading or for research using nonfiction sources more advanced than those found in the children’s or teen sections of the library. It will dissuade such families from moving here. It will discourage Texas families from staying.
If a few Texas parents don’t want their kids to have free and full access to our libraries, let those parents hold their own children’s hands, never allow them out of their sight, and never allow them to think for themselves. That’s on them.
But Texas libraries are treasures paid for by our tax dollars. Leave our libraries alone and let the rest of us—of all age—make good use of them.
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