Texas Officials to Add Citizens to
Materials-Review Committee
The ongoing outcry over the availability of the sex-education titles It’s Perfectly Normal and It’s So Amazing at Montgomery County (Tex.) Public Library prompted county commissioners September 23 to double the size of the five-member reconsideration committee that examines challenged titles. Each commissioner will appoint one of the five new citizen-members, who will join the five librarians already on the committee.
“Businesses don’t want to come into a community that is not tolerant of different people,” warned Conroe Independent School District fine arts teacher Jerry McKinney. Montgomery County made national headlines regarding the challenges to the gay-positive titles and drawn media coverage on a Republican Leadership Council campaign to get replicas of art containing nudes removed from a Roman-themed mall in nearby Shenandoah, Texas.
Precinct 14 Republican Chairman Jim German retorted that the books’ defenders “are the same ones who spat on us when we came home from Vietnam [and] who will cry over their dead son’s or daughter’s casket because some child molester thought it was perfectly normal to molest and murder their child,” according to the September 24 Conroe Courier.
“If the Republican Leadership Council continues to dictate their own community standards, I believe a sleeping giant will be awakened and it won’t be the RLC,” area resident Sterling Huff predicted. Others accused the RLC of trying to sabotage a $10-million library capital-bond issue on the November 5 ballot, the Courier reported.
Posted September 30, 2002.
|
