A rural county in Texas will keep its libraries open after leaders considered shutting them down in the wake of a federal judge’s order to replace 17 banned books on their shelves, most that were related to teens, sex education and race.
A federal judge in March had ordered Llano County to return books that had been removed from library shelves after complaints from a local conservative group as part of an ongoing First Amendment court case. Most were related to teens, sex education and race, but they also include jokey “fart” books and Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book “In the Night Kitchen.”
The county issued a statement Thursday that appeared to blame the specter of closure on its opponents, detailing the financial burden that the protracted First Amendment battle had already imposed — more than $100,000 in legal fees and 250 employee hours responding to discovery demands. The library’s budget is $450,000 of a $15 million total county budget.
During a brief public comment period Thursday, Rhonda Schneider, 54, who supported closing the libraries, spent most of her time reading from a young adult fiction book called “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” that is part of the library collection. As she read an excerpt that included a conversation between two boys about oral sex and erections, the room was silent.“I am for closing the libraries until we get this filth off the shelves,” Schneider said.
The dispute began in the fall of 2021, when a group of conservative activists first contacted Cunningham, worried about what they called “filth” on the shelves. In “A public library cannot function if its librarians can be sued every time a library patron disagrees with their decision to weed a book. Librarians must continually weed books that aren’t being checked out to make room on the shelves for new arrivals.
Llano, a small county of 22,000 about an hour and a half from Austin, has been in an intense public debate about the content of its libraries since the conservative activists first targeted them in the fall of 2021.
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