Texas Board Decides It Will Stop Treating Nonfiction Book As Fiction After Nationwide Blowback
from the think-before-you-act,-bigots dept
Well, a wrong has been righted. Kind of. And for how long, no one really knows.
Texas is on the leading edge of book censorship in the United States — you know, the land most famous for its freedoms, one of which is the famous/infamous (depending on who you ask) First Amendment. It’s only second to another state run by the “Party of Free Speech,” according to data gathered by people who actually firmly believe in protecting First Amendment rights.
Texas is second in the nation in banning books, with more than 1,500 titles removed from 2021 to 2023, according to PEN America, a literary freedom non-profit. Only Florida has banned more, with 5,100 titles removed.
The censorship will continue to escalate, of course, despite this recent concession. Both Florida and Texas are run by publicly-funded bigots who not only encourage the worst of their constituents to engage in speech-threatening activism, but provide them with the codified weapons they need to accomplish this task.
But one county in Texas was on the receiving end of national negative press when its censorship board (the Montgomery County “Citizens Review Committee”) decided it wasn’t going to limit itself to banning books from public schools and libraries. It was also going to decide what is or isn’t a fact based on its subjective feelings about the facts themselves.
The Montgomery County Commissioners Court ordered librarians there to reclassify the nonfiction children’s book “Colonization and the Wampanoag Story” as fiction.
This reclassification decision is a consequence of a contentious policy change in March. Right-wing activists pressured the Montgomery County Commissioners Court to remove librarians from the review process for challenged children’s, young adult and parenting books.
That’s the sort of thing we expect from dictatorships and dystopian novels. It’s not the sort of thing we expect to see in the United States: a literal, unilateral decision to declare some facts to be fiction, simply because a government board, whose meetings are closed to the public, decided it would rather not allow children to have access to factual depictions of past violence against indigenous people.
Fortunately, the nonfiction book has now been restored to its proper classification. (h/t Techdirt reader Eric Knapp)
A Texas county reversed its decision to place Colonization and the Wampanoag Story, a children’s history book about the Native American experience, in the fiction category at local libraries.
[…]
The Texas community of Montgomery county, near Houston, reclassified the book after creating a citizen review committee, making the committee’s meetings secret and removing librarians from deliberations – changes driven by a conservative Christian group.
This move towards greater and more creative censorship is one of the expected side effects of allowing activists with religious agendas to be given an out-sized voice in day-to-day government. In this county, the propelling force is Michele Nuckolls, the founder of “Two Moms and Some Books” — a group whose innocuous name might make some people believe this a grassroots efforts that just wants what’s best for all children. In reality, it’s a self-described “Christian conservative group” that wishes to see as many people harmed as possible, especially those who don’t describe themselves as “Christian conservatives.”
The group advocates for books, primarily those about sexuality and transgender identity, to be moved to more “restrictive” adult sections of the library and for more Christian titles to be added to shelves.
Nuckolls is also an annoyance at local school board meetings — a place where she shouldn’t really be allowed to speak considering she homeschools her children and is generally not affected at all by any of the school board’s decisions.
But Nuckolls is going to face a bit more of an uphill battle the next time she and her bigoted buddies start leaning on the “Citzens Review Committee” to ban more books and/or declare facts that don’t portray white Christian conservatives in the most flattering light to be fiction.
At an Oct. 22 meeting, the Montgomery County Commissioners Court issued a stay against all actions of the citizens reconsideration committee since Oct. 1 and put any future decisions on hold.
The commissioners also created another committee to review and revise library policy, including the rules around the citizens reconsideration group. It will be made up of employees from different commissioners’ offices and advised by the county attorney’s office.
For now, Montgomery County is incapable of further embarrassing itself on the national stage. But once the stay is lifted, it will be up to the committee overseeing the Citizens Review Committee to prevent further such embarrassments from reoccurring. Given the fact that this committee will be comprised other representatives of the same county government that allowed the first debacle to happen, I don’t have particularly high hopes the county won’t try anything quite as stupid again once it’s been given the opportunity to do so. But at least it’s something, no matter how minimal it is. That means at least a few people on the inside are aware these actions are not only unwise, but unconstitutional. What Montgomery County needs is more of those people making decisions, rather than handing it off to the most ignorant policymakers and constituents in its midst.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, book ban, censorship, libraries, montgomery county, texas
Comments on “Texas Board Decides It Will Stop Treating Nonfiction Book As Fiction After Nationwide Blowback”
Solving the wrong problem
They shouldn’t have created an oversight board for the oversight board, they should have canned and blacklisted the entire lot of bigots as having shown themselves to be grossly unfit for the job of deciding for anyone what is and is not fit for reading.
Texas is a dystopian shithole, same with florida.
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I heard the gov is a little pissbaby
Bruh legit been sleeping since 1492.
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The united states didn’t exist until 1776, moron
Re: Re:
No, but the areas of the continent that would become the US certainly existed before 1776. Or are you now going to double down and argue that Hawaii and Alaska, etc., don’t count because they weren’t part of the US from 1776?
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When I rise to power, people who say “bruh” will be sterilized.
One of the problems was that the Citizen’s Review Committee was permitted to make up rules governing itself. Once it had that bit between its teeth, it was ungovernable by anything short of what happened here.
Why is it every time I hear about a group that describes themselves as ‘Citizens something something’ I think of dystopian fascists that thinks that their belief makes them the arbiter of truth.
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We could start our Citizens Against Citizens Review Committee. If that doesn’t work we could form Citizens Reviewing Citizens Review Committee Against Citizens Review Committee.
RRRWNJ Nutjob, I mean Nuckolls, isn’t about to stop her lunacy any time some.
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Sounds like a spinoff of the Department of Redundancy Department.
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Where do you think the naxis will build their internment camps to put all you people in after they get elected
Unconstitutional, how horrible. Or not. What business have fundamental Christians with the Constitution? That’s people’s law, not God’s law.
You keep coming up with punchlines like “that shows them as hypocrites” or “that’s unconstitutional” or other things that the people in question could not care less about.
They serve God (or Trump or whatever) and not sanity, logic, sense and sensibility or other wannabe demigods.
The Constitution protects bad people just as much as good people. So naturally you need to fix it up or ignore it if you want to get anywhere.
Very much the same energy as “2 girls 1 cup”
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Oh. Oh dear.
Where are all of the “conservatives” who scream so loudly about censorship when their comments are moderated? Why aren’t they screaming about this actual censorship?
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“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
Re: Re: Slight correction
“For my enemies, the law; for my friends, everything except consequences.”
They want more “Christian” books at school libraries? Buy a bunch of ultra-liberal Universalist Unitarian books and see how fast they say “we didn’t mean THAT kind of Christian”
Re: 'When I said christian I meant MY denomination only!'
Pretty sure mormons consider themselves christians too, so better get a few of their books as well to be thorough…
Out of context.
The general assumption made by everyone is that the book is actually historical. It is not. It is a lot of guesses about a period without documentation. It is historical fiction. So strangely enough they were not wrong. Well meaning or not the author did not make a truly historical work with verifiable references. Assumptions were quickly made that this book was “real history” without actually having a look into it.
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Do you really want to go down that route declaring that anything without “documentation” is fiction and not history? Perhaps you should explicitly define what you mean by documentation and see what it does to history as we know it, because a fairly large part of human history comes from oral tradition that was later written down.
Okay, so lets scrap every piece of “documented” history that came from oral tradition because it doesn’t have any verifiable references.
You have yet to prove that it isn’t since you assume that all history comes with verifiable references which isn’t remotely true.
The thing you are missing when making your argument, and I’m reiterating a bit here, a fair amount of history from some time-periods are built on guesswork because there are literally no direct sources for it and that’s why there are a whole academia devoted to historical research since history isn’t cut’n’dry and it doesn’t make it fictional because of it.
Finally, it’s damn easy to dismiss history because of ethno-centric views that people are unaware they hold – just look at what Ludovicus Vives called Herodotus, “The Father of Lies”, a name that stuck around for almost two and a half millennia until modern historians re-evaluated the writings of Herodotus.
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I really loved that you failed to provide any “verifiable references” for your own work of fiction.
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FYI, the Native Americans have a long history of oral tradition, so it doesn’t matter one jot that they didn’t commit anything to paper until fairly recently.
Christian Conservative, FEMALE?
https://scontent.fboi1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/464013294_937351041758755_3947887706335242370_n.jpg?_nc_cat=111&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=127cfc&_nc_ohc=wO3XEwrNdeMQ7kNvgH2zQKP&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent.fboi1-1.fna&_nc_gid=AwcsaIzFsA7WsCdM6izI-w5&oh=00_AYD-hrHm6nX5F_iurCIC_Fc_ml6WlVX9uSWwVJTvWAgwtQ&oe=6725F373
If ya cant read it.
The reason your granmother Didnt leave your grandfather has less to do with some moral compass or love then you think.
Until 1964 an employer could refuse to hire you Because you were a Woman.
Until 1974 Refusing to sell a Woman a home was Legal.
Until 1988 you could refuse to rent to a woman with Children.
Contrary to what People Believe, women didnt Stay because relationships were better, they Stayed because SOCIETY wasnt designed for Their independence.
Then lets add being Conservative, is that Orthodox or are you trying to make it SEEM that way? As then you would be considered a 2nd class person, in MOST/ALL religions.
Explain to be about being conservative and coming Out of your Kitchen.
Not just Texas…
Utah state school board has an asinine policy that if any book is banned by 3 schools, it must be removed from ALL schools.
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Well I certainly can’t see how that could be weaponized to allow a minority of bigots to enforce said bigotry over an entire state, even in places that don’t share their bigotry…
Ah a right wing american. So fucking dumb you don’t know your own countries history.
It’s less that they don’t know and more that they don’t want to know, and even more so don’t want their kids to know as little Timmy and/or Suzy might start noticing similarities between bigots in the books and how their own parents are acting if they’re getting an accurate historical education.
Par for the course
We are talking about Fundamental Christians who consider themselves God’s Chosen People and hate the Jews which they consider racially inferior. Those God-chosen people consider the Torah as the God-given word and law that has to be followed except when inconvenient. They wage war on everybody who does not submit to their religion’s message of peace and understanding and loving your enemies.
You really cannot blame them for being similarly consistent about their love for the Constitution as they are about the love for their religion. They have learnt to trust their leaders on their interpretation of what actions are supposed to result from their deeply-held beliefs.
To be fair, that kind of cognitive whiplash is not exactly new, and you can probably blame St Paul for it who coat-tailed on the life history of a man who had his initial stance towards non-Jews recorded as “It is not meet to take the children’s bread and cast it to the dogs.” by cooking up rules of what laws to consider relevant and what not in the context of getting a larger audience for his message.
Christianity is based on non-ironic selective blindness guided by what can be sold to the masses, so it isn’t surprising that there is a significant overlap between people of faith and people acting totally contrarian to what they are convinced to believe in.
“you don’t know your own countries history.”
Here is your big chance to educate, but it seems that was overlooked.
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country’s
It’s like religion is a part of the problem here.
really seems like it
Or
Someone if foisting this onto the religious direction Just to confuse WHO is doing it.
Vocal Minority? Who says they are religious? Looking at the jewish based religions, its funny that the Jewish are the last ones to Acknowledge the Rights of women. And even the Christians arent far ahead of that.
Maybe that’s it. Maybe they can’t indoctrinate the kids fast enough, or, horrors, they aren’t actually in the majority.
That’s an answer to my question: Why, when these people literally believe the previous genocides and slavery are totes ok and they are goddamned ready to do it again, do they try to bury that history as “ahistorical”, when they could be arguing (as more than a few do) that white makes right and they had it coming.