On a map of Texas, Llano County appears slightly south of the exact center. If you like culture, it’s pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Just over 20 thousand white people reside there. The African-American population is 0.46%, a few families. It’s also an economically bad off county with a median income for a household less than $35,000. A bunch of poor white people… you can probably guess it’s a MAGA hotbed. Neither Hillary nor Biden reached the 20% mark… as a matter of fact, in 2012, neither did Obama. The county is about 11 percentage points less vaccinated than the rest of the [already poorly vaccinated] state.
Llano didn’t have to wait for national reactionaries like Meatball Ron to come along before they started banning books. They began in 2021, when the county commissioners— who voted unanimously the following year to close their meetings to the public— forced the libraries to purge all books containing nudity, sex education, and discussions of racism. Librarian Suzette Baker in Kingsland was fired for her refusal to remove books from the shelves and subsequently, a lawsuit by 7 county residents resulted in a federal judge ordering the county to place a dozen of the banned children’s books, including a history by Isabel Wilkerson of the KKK and books dealing with the LGBTQ community, back on the library shelves.
Today, the county commissioners were due to announce they are shutting down the 3 county libraries entirely rather than allow the 12 books they find offensive, and refer to as “pornographic filth,” back on the shelves. They backed away at the last minute.
According to the lawsuit, the county commissioners kicked out the members of the library board in 2021 and replaced them with a new board that demanded review of the content of all its books. That led to several books being removed from its catalog access being cut off to an e-book service that included some of the disputed titles.
The defendants argued the books were removed as part of a regular “weeding” process following the library’s existing policies.
The judge later gave the library system 24 hours to place the books back onto shelves, saying “the First Amendment prohibits the removal of books from libraries based on either viewpoint or content discrimination.”
The Commissioners Court agenda item for the upcoming meeting does not include a reason for the possible closure of the library. What it does say is that the discussion is “regarding the continued employment and/or status of the Llano County Library System employees and the feasibility of the use of the library premises by the public.”
“It appears that the defendants would rather shut down the Library System entirely— depriving thousands of Llano county residents of access to books, learning resources, and meeting space— than make the banned books available to residents who want to read them,” Ellen Leonida, the attorney for plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement to CNN.
…The case comes amid ongoing fights across the country to protect access to books in response to a banning boom that has taken shape in the US – including in K-12 schools, universities and public libraries.
In 2022, the number of attempts to censor library books reached an unparalleled record high since the American Library Association began documenting data about book censorship over 20 years ago, the organization said in March.
It cataloged 1,269 demands to censor library books in 2022 – nearly double the number of challenges in 2021.
For better and for worse, this is what the Republican Party has come to represent with their self-destructive culture wars that are clearly defining the Democratic Party as the lesser evil in the minds of more and more people, even if not in hellholes like Llano County, Texas.
