Sara Stenson was a middle school librarian in Texas for many years. In this post, she calls on Governor Gregg Abbott to stop dragging school librarians into his culture wars with false and salacious claims.

She writes:

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…

“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.”

Read more at: https://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/other-voices/article256049972.html#storylink=cpy