I am stunned at how fast and how forceful some religious groups are pushing their demand that everyone live by their church dictates instead of civil law. In One state the pride parade is barely going to be allowed to have a permit after 20 people showed up to push religious reasons to deny the parade permit. They claimed their bible / religious views took priority to any other considerations because of their god / Satan. These people a decade ago wouldn’t have been listened to yet now seem to be calling the shots. In Florida Christian religious views trump all other considerations at town council / legislative meetings. I know in the south a lot of Christian privilege is assumed and there is little you can do right now against it, but it used to never take over the state legislatures. It is terrifying to see how entitled these Christians Taliban are in regulating other people’s personal lives, what other people’s kids can read, what other people’s kids can watch. These religious Taliban are not about keeping their freedoms they are about taking away other people’s freedoms, they are not about being to worship as they believe but about forcing others to follow their churches dictates in what is right or wrong. Hugs
Blistering Democratic opposition couldn’t stop legislation that criminalizes allowing minors into adult shows with “lewd” content from winning Senate approval. The Senate legislation, advancing on a 28-12 party-line vote, doesn’t mention “drag shows.” But (SB 1438) that Clay Yarborough, sponsored, is largely aimed at stopping children from attending those shows.
It authorizes state government officials within the Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) to suspend or revoke the liquor license of any establishment that admits minors to a live, adult performance. A person who admits a child to such a show would face a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to $1,000 in fines and up to a year in prison.
Democrats believe that the bill could also criminalize public drag shows such as those at outdoor Pride events.
Sen. Clay Yarborough [photo above] first appeared on JMG in 2010, when as a member of the Jacksonville City Council he declared that gays, Muslims, and atheists should not be permitted to hold public office, otherwise God will smite the fuck out of the country. Or something.
“I would say that when I read Romans Chapter 1, I see striking resemblances between where Rome was just prior to its fall in comparison to where America is today. There are striking similarities in what we allow in our societies. Rome did not fall from an outside attack, whether it was military or otherwise. It fell from within because it was morally bankrupt. And I believe we have been treading in that area for a while and the more that we do not embrace that which honors the Lord, we shouldn’t be surprised if the blessings do not continue on our land.”
It comes just one day after GOP Rep Barnaby went on an unhinged, transphobic rant likening trans people to “mutants, demons, and imps” — and GOP leadership remains silent.
Because that same bigotry is animating bills like the Drag Ban that passed in the Senate today.
You should see the parade of young women at the LA Fitness locations here in the Fort Lauderdale area. The women are dressed like something out of Mad Max, strips of clothing barely covering their tits, hanging out all over the place. I don’t object to what they are doing. I’m objecting to the application of one standard at LA Fitness (nothing…kids can go) and drag shows (aunties in drag are being banned).
You’re confused, Caitlin. It’s only embryos/fetuses (esp White ones in ‘merka) that are sacred. After they’re born, fuhgettabout ’em! AR-15 target practice the lot of the lil’ rugrats!
LOL! I am (was) a WASP, but I went to a Catholic college. First time I had (yes, mandated due to course work) to go to mass, I kept thinking, these men are in dresses. With filigree, embroidery, and really ornate hats.
They demand that parents have the right to make medical decisions for their kids, like not vaccinating them, then make it a serious crime to get their child gender affirming care.
GOP: “Parents know best what’s right for their children so government should back off!”
Also GOP: “Our (Republican) government knows better than parents what’s right for children when it comes to drag shows, CRT, education, gender affirming care, rape and pregnancy.”
“When are the sane Floridians going to wake up and do something?“
Probably about the same time that all the sane women in America finally organize to protect reproductive rights….. I’m frankly amazed it hasn’t happened.
The one thing that keeps me hopeful is that, socially, we have not backslid. One could make an argument that social progress is still moving forward. What’s critical is that our straight Allie’s be very awake and stand by us as we beat back these laws. If they “sit this one out” politically, we’re in (deeper) trouble.
Already is undone. Im just shocked at how quickly they are being allowed to take over. Before the feds wake up and realize it, its going to be to late to cut out this cancer
Many years ago (about 30) I was out with my friends at Houston’s pride parade. In addition to the gay and lesbian people you’d expect to see there, there were also a good number of Hispanic families with their kids. I found that odd until a friend told me that this is what Carnaval is like where they are from (including drag queens) so this is just good fun for the whole family to them. They didn’t think they had to shield children from adults in elaborate costumes. They were just putting on a show to entertain the crowd. They got it. I think most Republican leaders get it too. They just need a minority group to bash to distract their base from how sucky their lives are under GQP policies.
The people who habitually groom children into their stupid fucking cult feel they have the right to control others’ freedom of expression, and without any sense of irony, seek to enforce that control by labeling all expression they don’t approve of as “grooming”.
If you REALLY are concerned about children, why not protect them from Ministers and Priests? I mean, if you consider EVERY GAY PERSON a groomer, shouldn’t you consider EVERY Priest and Minister a child diddling monster? Close, or at least tax, the chucrhes.
A man read a passage from the Bible about resisting “sexual immorality.” “You think you are doing things based on laws,” a crying woman said, “but … you are letting Satan in.”
1) We don’t govern based on the Bible.
2) Actually, this is more like letting Satan *out.* :p
OT, but relevant; Back in the day when segregation laws were repealed, white people would just close down all the public pools and fill them in with concrete in order to spite black people. They literally made their own lives joyless in order to prevent other people from having fun as well.
And now that the children of those bigots are being told that reading is not a crime and they have to put all the hidden books back…. they’re doing the same thing and making new rules to just get rid of public libraries altogether.
It’s always the same shit with the Christians. They could quite easily change the channel, not check the book out, not go to the movie, not marry someone of the same sex, not have an abortion, but that isn’t enough. They have to prevent other people from doing things they object to. Newsflash, Christians: your god is losing ground and followers BECAUSE of your annoying and destructive nonsense.
They have their tax-exempt Churches, their schools, home schools, their colleges, their businesses, their radio/TV stations, their internet sites, their Christmas national holiday since 1870, and their cult is protected by the constitution…but that’s not enough, they want to force everyone to join their cult.
Festival organizers have already agreed that there won’t be any drag performances.
Just goes to show it doesn’t matter how may times you make concessions to these maniacs they will not stop until the entire LGBT+ community is erased. I’d go so far as to say that banning drag for fear of being called “groomers” merely encouraged them, and they clearly did not shy away from alleging child sexual abuse, “drag performances” or not.
It’s been said many times, but there’s no hate like christain love.
They claim moral superiority and at the same time overwhelmingly support the most immoral leaders the world has known. They screech about obscenity and at the same time are the most vociferous consumers of porn. They harp on “family values” and at the same time their kids are getting impregnated in middle school, are being beaten by their fathers and are being sexually abused by their clergy. They label us as sexual deviants and at the same time there’s no sexual act that we enjoy that they don’t also engage in. They lie and lie and lie and lie again–claim “gay friends” that they clearly do not have, claim knowledge about us, our lives, our intentions and our activities that they clearly do not hold, and the biggest lie of all–claim that their oppression and marginalization is an expression of love. The glee and schadenfreude that can clearly be seen on their faces every time they succeed at fucking over our community exposes their hypocrisy and treachery.
They may claim to love people like me despite my being an evil sodomite, but I don’t mirror their lie. So I feel free to say that I hate these assholes with the burning heat of a thousand suns. Every time one of these brain-dead morons opens their mouth to mewl about protecting their drooling simpleton brats from people like me, I want to smash their face with a bat. Every obstacle that our community has ever faced can be traced back to the hands of these religious freaks. They cannot die off soon enough for me.
Fuck your god, fuck your families, fuck your values, fuck your churches, fuck your morals and fuck you!
Thank you Ali for sending this link. I saved this author to my morning read file. The work below is not done by me I am only sharing it and all credit and support should go to the author at the link above. Hugs
Debunking one of the more bizarre anti-trans arguments making the rounds among pundits.
“Nobody in my life was particularly enthused that I turned out to be a man,” Liam told me. “My ex-girlfriend actually took my phone out of my hands when I was scheduling my first HRT consultation and hung up the phone. My mother cried. My father is still in a state of mourning.”
Liam (not his real name) is a trans man in his late teens who began transitioning a couple of years ago. He says he did not receive a lot of support from family, medical professionals, or peers.
An activist holds a sign calling for federal protection of transgender rights, in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on April 1, 2023. (Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
Contrary to what some anti-trans pundits would have you believe, Liam’s experience as a trans youth has been sadly typical. It’s far from the fictitious anti-trans narrative that we live in an affirming-to-a-fault society with an out-of-control left-wing medical establishment hellbent on “transing” cis lesbian and gay children.
For instance, on Twitter, Andrew Sullivan wrote, “A gay friend confided in me the other day: ‘If I’d been born twenty years later I would have been put on puberty blockers.’ Protect gay kids from the TQIA+ extremists.”
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Sullivan’s evidence here doesn’t even rise to the level of anecdote; his friend is making up a story, not reporting on anything that actually happened to him. And in fact, there is overwhelming evidence—from studies, from experts, from parents and children—that Sullivan’s friend is wrong. People are not pushed to be trans. Instead, trans people in our society face many social barriers to transition and little encouragement.
Not even anecdotes
Sullivan’s tweet is just a tweet. But full-length articles claiming a crisis of cis lesbian and gay “transing” aren’t much more rigorous.
David Moulton, writing in Tablet, claims, “The interests of legacy gay rights organizations have increasingly become divorced from their traditional constituents, gay men and lesbians” and as evidence points out that the Human Rights Campaign is using the word “transgender” more than lesbian and gay in its annual report. That probably has to do with an assault on trans rights. HRC’s report details and pushes back against attacks on LGBT people. When states are passing hundreds of anti-trans bills, you say “trans” a lot. (“When bigoted lawmakers took aim at transgender youth, our volunteer-based organization defended them with determined vigor.”) The use of the term is evidence of how much discrimination there is against trans people, not the opposite.
Similarly, Katie Herzog argues that the decrease in lesbian bars is a sign that the trans and nonbinary establishment has made lesbianism uncool or embarrassing. But couldn’t the issue just be that lesbians are more accepted now and, as a result, feel more comfortable going to mainstream venues?
Both Moulton and Herzog are trying to pit trans people against cis lesbian and gay people by framing support for trans people as inherently homophobic. It’s a tactic picked up with glee by straight transphobes like Graham Linehan, who has penned condescending odes to “our baby homosexuals.” It’s also embraced by active homophobes like the Family Research Council.
Trans youth face enormous stigma
Moulton and Herzog cobble together a bunch of anecdotes and vague accusations based on little more than their discomfort with an LGBT movement that includes trans people. But when you actually look at the extant evidence, the suggestion that cis lesbian and gay people are being oppressed by a trans establishment is ludicrous.
In the first place, there is a strong correlation between transphobia and homophobia; researchers found that “homophobia is likely to always be the ‘best’ predictor of transphobia and these two constructs probably share a common foundation.” Where transphobia and homophobia diverge, however, the evidence that trans people face serious stigma, and often worse stigma than cis gay or lesbian people, is extensive.
Most obviously, Republicans and conservatives across the country are pushing more than 400 draconian anti-trans bills through state legislatures. These bills criminalize trans health care, force trans youth to detransition, criminalize trans use of public bathrooms, force schools to out trans youth to their parents, and more. While these bills may harm gay and lesbian and gender nonconforming youth in some ways, they are particularly framed as an attack on trans people–hardly a sign that trans identities are seen as more acceptable and legitimate than gay or lesbian ones.
Young trans people demonstrate in the center of Rome for the rights of trans people, organized by the Gender x movement, on April 1, 2023, in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Simona Granati – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
Homeless statistics mirror the current public anti-trans panic. Homophobic parents often throw their children out of the house or make life so miserable for them that they leave home. As a result, according to the Trevor Project, 23% of cis queer youth report experiencing homelessness or housing instability at some point in their lives. Those figures are however even worse for trans youth; 38% of trans women, 39% of trans men, and 35% of nonbinary youth said they had experienced homelessness.
Similarly, thanks to widespread social stigma, queer youth often experience severe mental distress and mental illness. According to the Trevor Project, 1 in 3 cis queer youth contemplated suicide in the past year, and 1 in 10 cis queer youth attempted suicide in the same period. Those are horrible numbers. But statistics for trans youth, again, are even worse. More than half of trans and nonbinary youth contemplate suicide, and almost 1 in 5 reports making a suicide attempt.
It’s also worth noting that researchers have found that “many if not most trans people are LGBQ following transition.” Liam, for example, had thought of himself as a lesbian before transition, but after coming out as a trans man, he also realized he was bisexual.
“I just never entertained the idea of being with a man until after I was presenting as a man,” he told me. “Being a straight girl was the farthest thing from myself that I could imagine.” If there is a sweeping plot to turn gay people straight by forcing them to be trans, that plot failed spectacularly with Liam. Trans people do not transition because they want to be straight. They transition because they are trans.
“I have never in my entire career encountered a parent who pushed their child to identify as trans”
Daniel Summers, a Boston-area primary care pediatrician, confirmed that in his experience, parents are “notably more comfortable with their children being lesbian or gay than trans.” Even supportive parents of trans kids see it as a challenge, he said; that’s not the case for supportive parents of lesbian and gay children. “I have never in my entire career encountered a parent who pushed their child to identify as trans if they did not already identify that way themselves,” he concluded. “Not once, for any reason.”
Kelly Storck, a therapist who has provided gender-affirming care in St. Louis for 15 years, agreed. Acceptance of gay and lesbian identity has improved slowly over the years, but, “most of my clients, regardless of age, still hold a lot of fear around having a gender that’s different than their assigned sex,” Storck emphasized. She added that her clients often have an “overwhelming fear of rejection from their families and peers.” That’s not what you’d expect if there were a successful coordinated campaign to make cis gay and lesbian people adopt trans identities.
Clara Baker, a parent of four in Bar Harbor, Maine, told me her son transitioned when he was three, and is now 12. Baker’s mother was a feminist scholar, and Baker was very familiar with third-wave feminism and gay rights. But she was “really ignorant” of trans issues. “My first thought was, if I let him wear boy clothes, will I turn him into a boy?” she said.
In order to deal with her son’s dysphoria, she educated herself and got him the care he needed, but “there was a ton of resistance from health care providers, family members who were super educated…” Even logistically, there were major barriers, since she had to drive an hour to an endocrinologist to get monthly blood tests. “I was so without support,” she said.
Young trans people participate in a demonstration in the center of Rome for the rights of trans people organized by the Gender X movement, on April 1, 2023, in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Simona Granati – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
Sam (not his real name) an author and journalist, told me he had, himself, resisted when his son came out as trans at 15. Sam had close friends who were gender critical, and he read some feminist anti-trans books. “We had arguments about it,” he said, “where I’d say, ‘Do you think you’re erasing your female identity?’” Eventually, though, he said he realized that his concerns were “just because I was more comfortable with lesbian and gay people [than with trans people]. And so that was on me.”
Sikh freelance journalist Veerender Singh Jubbal was the one exception among those I interviewed; he said that his parents had more context for trans identity than for bisexual identity. In India, there is an established category of “Hijra” to refer to people who are trans or intersex and are viewed as a third gender, Jubbal said. As a result, he said, his parents, “definitely know more stuff in regards to transgender issues than queer issues.” That’s the “opposite” of North America, where people are more comfortable with queer identities that are not trans.
From the perspective of a culture that does, to some degree in some situations, treat trans identities as less stigmatized than some cis queer ones, Jubbal can say with some certainty that the US does not see things that way.
A pretext for discrimination
“With my mother assuming and my father asserting that I was in fact a lesbian (though I had told the both of them about my crushes on boys as a kid) it was incredibly hard to find myself until I moved out,” Liam told me. His experiences with the medical establishment were disheartening and discouraging as well. “I found a lot of the questions superficial,” he said. “If I hadn’t answered that I only own five shirts, would I have been rejected from medical transition? It left me wondering why it was necessary for me and other trans people to present in such a binary way to receive proper medical treatment.”
When you look at the research or speak to clinicians, parents, or young people themselves, it is clear that no one is being pushed to be trans. Instead, trans people face persistent discrimination and resistance from family, friends, doctors, and politicians when they try to be true to themselves.
The claim that trans people are somehow infecting cis gay and lesbian people is part of that discrimination. Framing trans people as a danger to themselves and others creates the pretext for anti-trans legislation, for parental rejection, for the denial of medical care. Building that foundation of bigotry empowers Christofascists, homophobes, and reactionaries. In the long run, and even in the short run, it will not help any LGBT youth, cis or trans.
___
Where indicated, some names have been changed to allow interviewees to speak freely.
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We all have seen drag. We all grew up with it. From Red Skeleton to Bob Hope, and so many more up to the 1970s Flip Wilson’s Geraldine who was amazingly popular. People love drag as it is simply dress up. It is Halloween at anytime. Drag is not a threat to society nor to anyone, not even children. What the right wants to make it is a boogieman they can use as a cudgel against others and something to rally up their base because their voting base works only on anger and rage. The right wants everyone to forget their fun drag memories and now think of any guy in a dress acting in drag as a “drag queen story hour reading to kids making them gay and trans” and also they want to make “all drag is trans people” so to spread the hate their base has for trans people to people playing dress up. Heck in their minds trans people are people playing dress up. Wow, how fucked up is that they will deny all medical science to keep their bigotry. Hugs
Knowing a trans or nonbinary person significantly reduced the chance that someone would say that they’re a threat.
A new poll found that a majority of Democratic, independent, and even Republican likely voters believe that there is “too much legislation” aimed at reducing LGBTQ+ rights at the state level.
Theprogressive polling firm and think tank Data for Progressconducted a survey of 1220 participants and asked about the 429 bills presented at state legislatures attacking LGBTQ+ rights. Most of the bills are aimed at transgender youth, and 17 have already become law this year.
Here are all the anti-trans bills that have become law in 2023
Republican lawmakers have worked round the clock to pass oppressive bills targeting gender-affirming care, bathroom usage, drag shows, and trans students.
72% of Democratic voters agreed with the statement that there is “too much legislation. Politicians are playing political theater and using these bills as a wedge issue,” and only 20% agreed that it’s “the right amount of legislation. Politicians are dealing with a real danger that needs to be addressed.” 65% of independent voters agreed that there is too much anti-LGBTQ+ legislation this year.
The more surprising result – considering how the vast majority of lawmakers voting for these bills are Republicans – was that 55% of Republican voters agreed that there is too much anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Only 33% said that there is the “right amount” of such bills.
The survey also asked if people believed that being transgender is a “natural phenomenon that has occurred throughout history” that’s “normal” or if they believed that being trans is a “new phenomenon created by our modern woke culture” that will “harm our children.” Most Democrats (78%) and most independents (58%) agreed that being trans is natural. Only 34% of Republicans agreed that being trans is natural, while a majority (55%) said that it’s a new phenomenon.
While Republicans lag on that issue, Data for Progress noted that a majority of all likely voters (57%) said that being trans is natural, which could indicate that attacks on trans youth might not be the potent electoral winner that many Republican strategists believe it is.
While state Republican lawmakers have been introducing anti-transgender legislation for over a decade, there was an explosion of such legislation in 2021, just several weeks after Donald Trump’s loss in the general election. Democrats accused Republicans – many of whom had never shown any concern for the state of girls’ and women’s sports – of using transgender kids to distract from the GOP’s less popular positions on the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy.
Part of the reason that such a strategy could work is that transgender people make up a small percentage of the population and many people don’t think they know anyone who is transgender. Only 36% of Democrats, 39% of independents, and 25% of Republicans said that they know someone who is trans or nonbinary, and a majority of each group said that they didn’t.
And knowing a trans or nonbinary person decreases the chance that someone will see them as a threat. Among likely voters who know someone trans or nonbinary, 78% said that trans people are not a threat to straight families and 66% said that they’re not a threat to children. Among people who don’t know anyone who is trans, though, those numbers dropped to 52% and 41%, respectively.
Most Democratic voters (54%) and independent voters (63%) believe that Democratic elected officials should be doing more to fight anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. The survey didn’t ask what they believe Democrats should be doing.
When it comes to drag bans, a majority of Democrats (68%) and independents (55%) said that they had seen a drag performance either live or on TV. 53% of Republicans, though, said that they have never seen a drag performance at all.
I would like everyone to notice Joe’s tweet at the end. Pro-life pretenders in Florida legislators passed this b ill along with the anti-trans, don’t say gay bills, anti-woke bills, anti books with LGBTQ+ or race history all in the name of protecting the children, but they approve open carry with no training. The amount of gun violence is already high here in Florida and will now go up. How is this pro-life? I don’t get it. Hugs
Senate preps anti-drag show bill by @Clay_Yarborough for passage despite apparent conflict with existing law
🚨 JUST IN: Florida Republicans introduced a late-filed amendment to expand their bill censoring drag shows to include those at city pride parades.
They're now using intimidation and threats of misdemeanor charges to scare LGBTQ-friendly cities out of hosting drag altogether. pic.twitter.com/if60MwYUvO
— Carlos Guillermo Smith (@CarlosGSmith) April 4, 2023
To be clear, the bill doesn’t ban drag. It censors drag in front of minors w/vague, subjective language and threatens misdemeanors, $10,000 fines, and license revocation for violations. That means businesses, and now cities, will be scared to welcome drag for fear of punishment.
— Carlos Guillermo Smith (@CarlosGSmith) April 5, 2023
Florida is currently debating SB 1438, a bill banning drag shows. Senator Yarborough, the chief sponsor of the bill admits that the bill would apply to live performances of Rocky Horror Picture Show. pic.twitter.com/klRKy0dFp8
Op-ed: #Florida's attacks on drag shows puts Shakespeare theatrical productions at risk, because he often featured characters who cross-dressed. https://t.co/dSA0jaModg
Florida Replicans have introduced a late amendment to implement a criminal ban on pride events throughout the state of Florida if anyone present is dressed in drag. pic.twitter.com/RVHnpf0yww
US District Judge Robert Pitman ruled that at least 12 books removed from public libraries must be placed back onto shelves within 24 hours.
Courtney Sacco/Odessa American/AP
CNN —
A federal judge in Texas ruled that at least 12 books removed from public libraries by Llano County officials, many because of their LGBTQ and racial content, must be placed back onto shelves within 24 hours, according to an order filed Thursday.
Seven residents sued county officials in April 2022, claiming their First and 14th Amendment rights were violated when books deemed inappropriate by some people in the community and Republican lawmakers were removed from public libraries or access was restricted.
The lawsuitfiled in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas in San Antonioclaimed county officials removed books from the shelves of the three-branch public library system “because they disagree with the ideas within them” and terminated access to thousands of digital books because they could not ban two specific titles.
Books ordered to return to shelves include “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson, “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and “Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen” by Jazz Jennings.
Texas residents are suing their county after books were removed from public libraries
The library system also is required to reflect these books as available in their catalog and cannot remove any books for any reason while the case is ongoing, US District Judge Robert Pitman said in his order.
“Although libraries are afforded great discretion for their selection and acquisition decisions, the First Amendment prohibits the removal of books from libraries based on either viewpoint or content discrimination,” Pitman said.
The fight to protect access to books comes amid a book banning boom, with an alarming increase in attempts to censor books in K-12 schools, universities and public libraries. Many of these efforts seek to pull books with LGBTQ characters or themes and are part of a broader, conservative-led movement to chisel away at the rights and status of LGBTQ Americans.
Many of the book bans have also been aimed at authors of color exploring history, racism or their own experiences in America.
“This is a ringing victory for democracy,” said Ellen Leonida, an attorney representing the plaintiffs in the Texas case. “The government cannot tell citizens what they can or can’t read. Our nation was founded on the free exchange of ideas, and banning books you disagree with is a direct attack on our most basic liberties.”
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Llano County officials have complied with the judge’s order.
Llano County Judge Ron Cunningham, county commissioners Jerry Don Moss, Peter Jones, Mike Sandoval, and Linda Raschke; library system director Amber Milum and four members of the Llano County library board, Bonnie Wallace, Rochelle Wells, Rhonda Schneider, and Gay Baskin, are named as co-defendants in the case. They did not respond to CNN requests for comment.
The defendantsargued the books were removed as part of a regular “weeding” process following the library’s existing policies, but Pitman said there was clear influence from outside sources.
School just started but the debate surrounding gender and race in classrooms is already at a fever pitch
“Whether or not the books in fact qualified for ‘weeding’ under the library’s existing policies, there is no real question that the targeted review was directly prompted by complaints from patrons and county officials over the contents of these titles,” the judge wrote in his order.
“And, notably, there is no evidence that any of the books were slated to be reviewed for weeding prior to the receipt of these complaints; to the contrary, many other books eligible for weeding based on the same factors appear to have remained on the shelves for many years,” he said.
Complaints from community groups targeted multiple books they labeled as “pornographic filth” because they promoted “acceptance of LGBTQ views,” according to the order. These books were removed from the libraries, according to the order, as well as other books listed as “pornographic” that were about ” ‘critical race theory’ and related racial themes.”
In one email from community member Bonnie Wallace, who was later elected to the library board, she suggested “all the pastors to get involved in this. Perhaps they can organize a weekly prayer vigil on this specific issue. … May God protect our children from this FILTH.”
County commissioners also voted to dissolve the library board and replace it with a new “Library Advisory Board” that appointed multiple Llano County residents, including Wallace, who advocated for the book removals, the order said.
The new board required all new books to “be presented to and approved” by them before purchase, and staff librarians were banned from attending the new board’s meetings, according to the order.
Book bans aim to ‘suppress the voices’ of LGBTQ and communities of color
In 2022, the number of attempts to censor library books reached an unparalleled record high since the American Library Association (ALA) began documenting data about book censorship over 20 years ago, ALAsaid in a March press release.
ALA cataloged 1,269 attempts in 2022; nearly double the number of challenges in 2021.
Alabama community rallies in support of a Black author after school district cancels Black History Month event
“A book challenge is a demand to remove a book from a library’s collection so that no one else can read it,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said in a statement. “Their aim is to suppress the voices of those traditionally excluded from our nation’s conversations, such as people in the LGBTQIA+ community or people of color.”
Schools are among those where book bans have been especially targeted. In 2022, Texas led the country with the most book bans – 713 – affecting 16 school districts, followed by Pennsylvania and Florida with 456 and 204 bans, respectively,according to an analysis by PEN America, a literary and free expression advocacy organization.
“Each attempt to ban a book by one of these groups represents a direct attack on every person’s constitutionally protected right to freely choose what books to read and what ideas to explore,” Caldwell-Stone said. “The choice of what to read must be left to the reader or, in the case of children, to parents. That choice does not belong to self-appointed book police.”
