Texas school librarians don’t deserve Gov. Abbott dragging them into culture wars

Gov. Greg Abbott never misses an opportunity to jump into the culture wars. He recently sent out an incendiary letter, essentially accusing schools and their librarians of promoting pornographic materials and threatening them with the force of law.

What are these pornographic materials, and how widespread is this practice? Perhaps he should consider these factors before impugning the reputations of our school librarians.

Later, Abbott pointed to two memoirs that have recently experienced local book challenges: “In the Dream House” by National Book Award-nominated Carmen Machado and “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe. Are these books widespread and being pushed into the hands of innocents? And are they pornography?

Librarians, as public servants, have no secrets. Anyone can access our online library catalogs. It is also important to note that the existence of a book in a library in no way signifies endorsement. Our job is to provide access to our communities and not only to materials which match our personal tastes or values. For example, children have access to “Mein Kampf” by Adolph Hitler in school libraries in Texas.

A quick search of the Austin ISD catalog reveals that in the entire district, serving 77,000 students, four copies of “The Dream House” and three copies of “Gender Queer” are on our high school library shelves. And Austin is a liberal city. I suspect only a handful of these two titles exist in Texas school libraries.

Even the legal definition of pornography in Texas states that the term applies to “any visual or written material that depicts lewd or sexual acts and is intended to cause sexual arousal.”

Neither book fits this definition. Just because a book includes some mature content does not make it pornography. School districts have policies for dealing with book challenges, and these should be followed before any books are removed from the shelves.

Does the book have value as a whole? Does it serve certain students in the community? It depends on the local community and if the book is age-appropriate to the patrons.

Do librarians make mistakes? I did. At times, I ordered books that ended up not being appropriate for my middle-school library and passed them up to high-school collections. Librarians choose books for their collections by consulting summaries and reviews in selection aids. They cannot possibly read each book entirely before it is ordered.

But the bigger question is: Whose decision is this? Certainly, parents have every right to monitor what their children read, just not all children. Does the state have the right? Individual school boards?

Luckily or not, we’ve been here before. In the 1982 case Island Trees v. Pico, the Supreme Court ruled that not even school districts can deprive students of the right to read.

A New York school board had voted to remove certain books from the school library for various reasons, including “filth.” Among them was “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of four students whose right to read was protected under the First Amendment.

“The government — in this case, a public school — cannot restrict speech because it does not agree with the content of that speech,” the Bill of Rights Institute says in summarizing the case. “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.”

“Voluntary” is the key that protects libraries and our freedom to read.

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the censorship wars of his day: “If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.”

Sara Stevenson is a former middle school librarian in Austin and a member of the Texas Library Association and the American Library Association.