Texas Wingnut Says Dirty Book Ban Would Include ‘Lonesome Dove.’ Not A Good Move In Texas.

We missed this when it happened a little over a week ago, so a Saturday seems like a great time to catch up. Texas state Rep. Jared Peterson (R) is pushing HB 900, a school censorship bill he disingenuously calls the “READER Act,” aimed at keeping “sexually explicit” books out of school libraries. (The acronym stands for “Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources,” so it’s really more of a Don’t be a Reader act.)

The bill would require book vendors to label all books that contain any sexual content as either “sexually relevant,” meaning it’s allowable under required school curriculum, like sex ed or health, or “sexually explicit,” meaning it’s offensive and smutty and cannot be sold to schools. There’s no other category.

Parents would have to give express written permission for their kids to check out the “sexually relevant” materials, and the other kind would simply be removed. Later this year, vendors would also have to give schools a complete list of past sales, too, identifying books with any mention of sex with one label or the other. Any vendor found to have left filthsexporn books off the list would be barred from ever selling books to Texas schools again.

And just to clean up any cases where a book seems filthy but isn’t quite explicit, the bill also “permits the exclusion from a school library of materials that are pervasively vulgar or educationally unsuitable,” which we’ll assume is some kind of Captain Underpants clause.

At a House Public Education Committee hearing on the bill, Peterson proclaimed that it was really simple: “There should be no sexually explicit books” in any high school library, period.

State Rep. James Talarico (D) came to the hearing prepared with a simple question about his favorite book, Larry McMurtry’s 1985 epic of the fading frontier, Lonesome Dove. We’ll confess we haven’t read it ourselves, but we understand It’s the official favorite novel of Texas. But it’s also very frank about the realities of the Old West: one of the main characters is a prostitute, and the book includes both consensual sex and a terrible sexual assault and its aftermath. Plus, a whole lot of nonsexual violence.

So Talarico asked Peterson at the hearing, would Lonesome Dove have to be removed from every school library in Texas?

Patterson admitted he had never read Lonesome Dove — My San Antoniocolumnist John DeVore wondered if that might not actually disqualify Patterson from being in the Lege altogether — and proceeded to what might be Lone Star blasphemy:

“I don’t care if it’s ‘Lonesome Dove’ or any other novel — if it has sexually explicit material, I would view that as an incredible win for the students of the state to not have that material in the library.” said Patterson. […]

Patterson told members of the House Public Education Committee that the aim of his bill is simple: If a book has sexually explicit content, it has no home on any bookshelf in any of Texas’ nearly 9,000 K-12 campuses.

As DeVore points out, Lonesome Dove is the Great Texas Novel, “the closest thing to a holy text in Texas, except for actual holy texts.” He suggests newly-elected Texas office-holders could be given the option “to swear on a copy of Lonesome Dove instead of the Bible,” although we’d add that plenty of allegedly Christian politicians don’t seem terribly familiar with the contents of the latter book, either. The Bible has a lot of sex stuff, too, but we hear it’s necessary for the plot.

The story went viral, helped by another Republican’s attempt to insist that Lonesome Dove would surely not face removal because according to her extensive research, there wasn’t anything dirty in it.

That ally was Christin Bentley, a member of the State Republican Executive Committee and occasional blogger for the rightwing “Texas Freedom Coalition,” which started as an anti-mask group during the pandemic, and has expanded into a rightwing cultural grievance clearinghouse. Bentley’s research consisted of buying Lonesome Dove as an ebook on Amazon, only without the link that gives Yr Wonkette a small cut.

As Bentley explained on Twitter, she did a keyword search for four dirty words — fuck, vagina, sex, and pussy — which she found are not in the book, and therefore. Rep. Talarico “should be relieved to know that this book is not sexually explicit.” Because Yr Wonkette is committed to the spirit of free scholarly inquiry, we reproduce Bentley’s findings for you here, cropped and edited into a single image:

But Bentley also went the extra mile, searching for at least one other dirty word and proclaiming, “Sh*t… as in rat sh*t, bear sh*t, and cow sh*t is as bad as it gets. It’s NOT sexually explicit.”

So that pretty much settles the question: Christin Bentley has not read Lonesome Dove, as many many replies pointed out.

At Texas Monthly, Christopher Hooks says Bentley’s research protocols were simply ill matched to the subject:

Of course, Lonesome Dove is set in the 1870s: Bentley was searching for the wrong words. Twitter users helpfully suggested she search for the word “poke.” (Hard to picture Gus yelling “p—y” across the range.) But even a better search would have been of limited value. With a short summary, you can make Lonesome Dove sound like smut or a wholesome novel. The only way to evaluate it properly, as with any book, is to read it and think about it in its totality. That’s the point of books: You can step into the lives of characters unlike you. You can think about what it’s like to be a woman or a man, consider issues you had never given thought to, and step back into your life at the end of it, your horizons a little wider.

Now hold on here, mister smartypants intellectual! The point of reading is not to encounter the wider world or people different from you, the point of reading is to never be indoctrinated by ideas that the Texas Freedom Coalition says are dangerous, particularly if those thoughts involve LGBTQ people or the ridiculous notion that America has ever been an unpleasant place to live for people who are not white suburban Texan Christians (preferably Babtist or Methodist, at that).

The Great Texas Library Purge has focused in particular on books by or about LGBTQ+ people and racism, and as Hooks notes,

Patterson has put rhetorical emphasis in his pitch for his bill on books that have “sexual indoctrination,” a euphemism for ones about gender-nonconforming or gay kids. The fear he and allies are stoking seems to be that by reading these books, formerly immaculate daughters and sons will become transgender.

The problem, though is that if you try to hide the anti-gay bigotry by a ban on all descriptions of sex, you won’t just be banning YA novels that have LGBTQ characters, you’ll also be getting rid of books that include smut like this:

In that respect, Gus was unusual, for most men didn’t talk. He would blab right up until he shoved his old carrot in, and then would be blabbing again, before it was even dry. Generous as he was by local standards—he gave her five dollars in gold every single time—Lorena still felt a little underpaid. It should have been five dollars for wetting his carrot and another five dollars for listening to all the blab. Some of it was interesting, but Lorena couldn’t keep her mind on so much talk. It didn’t seem to hurt Gus’s feelings any.

Hooks also notes that most adults haven’t heard of, much less read, many of the books that end up on the banners’ lists, such as Gender Queer, so what the hell, few of them will care if they’re removed from libraries. They may have a constituency, like queer young people or graphic novel nerds, but those people are weird and easily dismissed too.

But when it comes to something like Lonesome Dove, enough Texans have read it “to know that while the book is challenging, it is enriching, and being able to make sense of its challenges is part of growing up, especially in this state.”

And maybe, just maybe, that will give people pause when the censorious bigots come after other books. One can hope, at least; Patterson’s stupid bill passed out of committee this week — with three votes from Democrats (!) — and is headed to the full House.

[Texas Monthly / My San Antonio / Texas Tribune / Texas HB 900 / Lonesome Dove (Wonkette gets a tiny cut)]

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