Texas county keeps libraries open amid fight over banned books
A rural Texas county's public libraries will remain open while a court battle continues over whether local officials can remove books deemed inappropriate, commissioners decided on Thursday.
The Llano County commissioners in central Texas held a special meeting to consider closing the three public library branches after a federal judge's ruling to return banned books to shelves and not censor any more.
Llano County - with a population of about 22,000 located about 60 miles northwest of Austin - is the latest flashpoint in a battle over books in libraries across the US.
The four commissioners and judge of the Llano County commissioners court, as the governing body is known, heard from 15 members of the public during a tense meeting before going into executive session. Most who spoke wanted the libraries to remain open.
"You have the decision to do the right thing," said Suzette Baker, a former Llano County librarian who said she was fired in March. "Keep the libraries open. Keep the information available to all equally."
But others said they wanted the libraries shut until books they labeled "pornographic" were out. They read aloud explicit sex scenes from books.
Llano resident Lisa Bellamy supports banning certain books and said she doesn't think topics like sexuality were appropriate for books children could access.
"When it comes to LGBT issues, that's really a topic that I think... it's an adult topic. We're talking about sexual orientation," Bellamy said. "I don't think that a child should be exposed to homosexual or heterosexual content that is explicit in that way."
County Judge Ron Cunningham, the top elected official in the county, announced after the executive session that the libraries would remain open and said "We will try this in the courts, not through social media or through news media".
He said the books had been returned to the shelves, but did not say when.
Among the books removed, according to the lawsuit, were "Caste: The Origins of our Discontent" by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson and "They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group" by Susan Campbell Bartoletti.
Over 1,600 titles, mostly addressing racism and LGBTQ issues, have been removed from libraries in 32 states in the past year, according to the writers' organization PEN America.
