Granbury Texas Independent School District has removed eight books from school library shelves on the grounds that they contain pornographic content, as decided by a group of district staff, parents, and residents.
“I don’t want to keep picking up a book, whether it’s about homosexuality or heterosexuality, and reading about how to hook up sexually in our libraries,” said Granbury ISD Superintendent Jeremy Glenn.
Glenn’s comments were made at a January 10 meeting in Granbury with the district’s librarians, NBC News reports.
Glenn told librarians at the meeting that he believed the community of Granbury — located roughly 70 minutes southwest of downtown Dallas — is conservative and always will be.
“If you do not know this, you’ve been probably under a rock, but Granbury is very, very conservative,” Glenn said. “Our board is very, very conservative, and if you may agree with that, you can shake your head and say, ‘I agree. I’m conservative too,’ or you may say, ‘I don’t agree with that at all, and that’s not what I believe.’ If it is not what you believe, you better try it because it ain’t changing in Granbury.”
The superintendent maintained that he supported books that illustrated different cultures but not books that included sexually explicit themes or imagery. He noted that Governor Greg Abbott has said criminal investigations will be conducted into schools that make such content available.
“Specifically, what we’re getting at, let’s call it what it is, and I’m cutting to the chase on a lot of this,” Glenn said. “It’s the transgender, LGBTQ, and the sex — sexuality — in books. That’s what the governor has said that he will prosecute people for, and that’s what we’re pulling out.”
Legal, education, and First Amendment experts said the audio of the superintendent, combined with the decision to abruptly remove books from circulation, even temporarily, raises constitutional concerns.
In partnership with ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, NBC asked Kate Huddleston, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas, to review the recording of Glenn’s statements.
“This audio is very much evidence of anti-LGBTQ and particularly anti-trans discrimination,” Huddleston opined. “It is very much saying the quiet part out loud in a way that provides very significant evidence that book removals in the district are occurring because of anti-LGBTQ bias.”
However, in a statement on Granbury ISD’s website, the district held that the books were removed solely based upon the presence of sexual content.
The statement read, “Ultimately, the review committee determined that eight books were sexually explicit and not age-appropriate. Two of the eight books did have LGBTQ+ themes. However, all of the books that were removed had sexually explicit and/or pervasively vulgar content.”
Granbury ISD invited the public to inspect the eight books that would be removed from the library on March 24, according to Texas Scorecard. Three of the books were said to contain sexually explicit content or illustrations, while the remaining five reportedly featured “sexy teen romance.”
The recommendations for removal are the result of a two-month review of 131 titles held by the Granbury ISD Libraries.