Texas Board Decides It Will Stop Treating Nonfiction Book As Fiction After Nationwide Blowback

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.