Something's Wrong With the Grownups
I've just about had it with some adults here
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Welcome to Texas, where things have been a little more “yee” than “haw” these days. I mean, we’re not Florida, where the founder of Moms for Liberty and one of the driving forces behind the “Don’t Say Gay” bill recently admitted to having a threesome with the woman who accused her husband, the state GOP chair, with sexual assault.1 But when it comes to completely losing the plot these days concerning the children, Texas stands tall as a proud paragon of centering the baby bunny fee-fees of oddly fragile adults.
To hear them tell it, school librarians are pushing porn at children. The legislature passed a law in 2022 making it easier to challenge books, and last year the Lone Star State led the country in banning books in school libraries.
A school library is a lousy place to look for porn.
One reason you don’t hear Texans bragging more about this is that as it turns out it’s quite difficult to figure out what books are appropriate for children when you’re ignoring trained and certified librarians and focusing instead on angry parents. The Fort Worth school district had to shut down all its school libraries at the beginning of the school year so they could figure out which books to ban.
Now, you might think that a school library is a lousy place to look for porn — especially with the internet offering up such a wide variety of pornography that it would have made Larry Flint vote Republican — but what invariably comes up when they’re looking for porn in libraries are books with queer people existing in this world. At first I thought this was dumb. After all, book or no book, queer students exist. But the censors might be onto something. If you ban the books that include gay kids, then these kids might be fooled into thinking that they don’t exist.
A Superintendent in a rural school district in north Texas is now no longer allowed to have any oversight over his district’s fine arts program after he made a dog’s breakfast of the senior play. It seems the Superintendent was upset that a trans boy was given a role in which he’d play a male character named Ali Hakim. That role comes with a solo in the song “It’s a Scandal! It’s a Outrage!” Can you imagine what Shakespeare would have said? Next thing you know, high school girls will play male characters, too!
The Superintendent, acting unilaterally and outside of board policy, decreed that students would only be allowed to play roles that corresponded with their sex at birth. Think of it as Thespian Geraminals, but instead matching your bathing suit area to an imaginary character. And as weird as it is to imagine an adult so singularly worried about what is inside of a child’s underwear, the shocking thing was how sanely the community reacted. This wasn’t fair to that trans boy or, for that matter, the few young ladies who were playing male roles.
Thespian Geraminals, but instead matching your bathing suit area to an imaginary character.
The Superintendent threw up a bureaucratic flare decoy in suggesting the production use a dumbed-down adolescent version of the play that would cut out the young man’s solo. In a statement, the district said the change was warranted because “the current production contained mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content.”
But we weren’t talking about Angels in America. The play in question was Oklahoma!, the early ‘40s Rogers and Hammerstein musical about love and American expansion. It’s hard to get more wholesome than men competing for a woman’s virtue while stealing tribal lands. If you’re attending Oklahoma! in hopes of libidinous titillation, you will be disappointed. “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” is not about queer fashion, and “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” is not celebrating a successful one night stand.
The school board, in an admirable stand against one adult’s determination to ruin things for children, told the Superintendent to get bent. He’s under investigation, and the play is back on for late January. Tickets are still available.
Cooler heads did not prevail in Austin, where the Republican-dominated State Board of Education rejected several science textbooks for not being nicer to the oil and gas industry. To be fair, this is the first time Texas science textbooks will mention climate change, so some adjustment is to be expected, but some of the objections seemed amiss.
One book was rejected because it taught students how to advocate for policies that mitigate climate change.2 Others said the rejected textbooks didn’t focus on religion enough.
Evelyn Brooks, a Republican board member from Frisco who represents District 14, for example, on Tuesday questioned the scientific consensus on climate change and suggested that “creation” — a religious concept — should be taught alongside scientific theories of the origins of the universe. Brooks was first elected to the board in 2022 and said that she wanted to see more perspectives of people of faith included in the books.
“The origins of the universe is my issue — big bang, climate change — again, what evidence is being used to support the theories, and if this is a theory that is going to be taught as a fact, that’s my issue,” Brooks said while discussing one of the textbooks. “What about creation?”
You might logically be upset here that people in charge of setting educational standards in science in Texas do not understand what a scientific theory is. It’s best not to get hung up on that as we’ve found logic and reason are crude tools ill-suited to contemporary discourse here in Texas.
If you spend too much time trying to make sense of adults who think kids are looking for porn in school libraries, you’ll get a headache. And if you empathize with queer kids who are being told their existence is disgusting, your heart will hurt.
But what makes me angry is having to accept that there are butt-hurt adults who create fantasy worlds that have nothing to do with the reality that kids live in. Instead of doing anything about guns, they’re mad about books. Instead of giving teachers a pay raise, we’re in a tizzy about how there might be queer kids in, of all places, musical theater. And while we are finishing up the hottest year ever, adults are angry that textbooks aren’t more closely aligned with Genesis.
God bless Texas, and hurry.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
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Wow, that’s a lot!
The horror.