book bans

Prison book programs have been sending free books to Texas prisons for years, but recently, they've been told they're no longer allowed to under a policy they say they've never heard of before.

The state’s teachers’ union said in a statement it would stand by the state’s public school teachers who “teach the truth.”

A federal judge in Austin temporarily blocked a new state law restricting which books are available in school libraries. The state then appealed. But whether or not the law is upheld, efforts to censor what students can read have intensified in Texas.

Board member Danny Zeck, a Republican from Leavenworth, alternately cursed, waved books he objected to, and raised concerns about the “Marxist lesbian” in charge of the American Library Association during a Kansas State Board of Education meeting this week, as other board members tried to redirect the conversation.

Texas had over 90 challenges of over 2,300 books, nearly double the number of attempts as the next state on the list.

House Bill 900 requires book vendors to rate all their materials based on their depictions or references to sex before selling them to schools. Vendors say the law aims to regulate protected speech with “vague and over broad” terms.

Members of St. Marys five-person city commission, all of whom are members of an extreme Catholic religious sect, have threatened to pull the lease of the public library if they don't remove all LGBTQ+ and other "socially divisive" books from the shelves. Their efforts have drawn a warning from the ACLU of Kansas.

The new law puts the onus on book vendors to rate books they sell to schools.