Sex-Education Books
Repopulate Texas Shelves
Montgomery County (Tex.) Library System Director Jerilynn Williams took the advice of a materials review committee November 19 and ordered the reinstatement of two sex-education books by Robie H. Harris to their original places on the shelves of the library. It’s Perfectly Normal, recommended for ages 10 and up, was returned to the adult section, in which all young-adult titles are intermingled; It’s So Amazing, written for children age 7 and above, went back on the nonfiction juvenile shelves.
The review committee served for the first time in reconstituted form—doubled in size so five citizen reviewers could serve alongside five librarians, an expansion motivated in the first place by the community fracas over the titles. “They have reconfirmed that the library should have a wide range of information,” Williams said in the November 20 Conroe Courier. Jeff Van Fleet of the Montgomery County Republican Leadership Council, which had favored the books’ removal, told the newspaper, “Right now, we have to abide by that decision.”
The titles’ reinstatement came just two weeks after MCLS narrowly won a $10-million library bond that supporters accused the RLC of trying to scuttle by creating a book-banning smokescreen. Meantime, the library has received three new challenges, among them a complaint against Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting by James Kincaid. “These are just three of hundreds of books we have found in our libraries helping to lay the groundwork for a culture of child molesters and homosexuals,” Van Fleet told the Courier.
Posted November 25, 2002.
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