With schools back in session, school board meetings have essentially descended into battlefields where angry parents routinely show up to rail against mask mandates. Some of these encounters have gotten downright nasty and many have required the police to show up and physically remove people from the buildings. It’s not been a great situation.
During a Wednesday night school board meeting in Texas, things took a decidedly different turn even though anti-masking was still in the mix. While taking the podium, former Lake Travis ISD school board candidate and mother Kara Bell proceeded to read an excerpt from the book, Out of Darkness, which described sexually explicit acts, specifically the term “cornhole.”
Not being familiar with the phrase outside of the backyard BBQ game, Bell Googled the word and learned that it means anal sex, which prompted her to show up at the meeting and proceed to loudly declare that her butt is strictly off-limits while blasting the book’s availability to middle school students.
“I do not want my children to learn about anal sex in middle school. I’ve never had anal sex, I don’t wanna have anal sex, I don’t want my kids having anal sex. I want you to start focusing on education and not public health!” Bell yelled as the board cut her mic and struggled to bring her time to an end.
Kara Bell read a passage from a middle school library book that was so pornographic the school censored her reading.
The book Bell was referring was written by Ashley Hope Perez and, according to a synopsis, it “chronicles a love affair between an African American boy and a Mexican American girl against the backdrop of a horrific 1937 explosion in East Texas, which killed nearly 300 schoolchildren and teachers.”
The Lake Travis Independent School District has since confirmed that Bell got her wish in the end, and the book has now been pulled from the libraries of two middle schools.
A spokesperson for the district told local news outlet KXAN:
“A district possesses significant discretion to determine the content of its school libraries. A district must, however, exercise its discretion in a manner consistent with the First Amendment.”
“A district shall not remove materials from a library for the purpose of denying students access to ideas with which the district disagrees. A district may remove materials, because they are pervasively vulgar or based solely upon the educational suitability of the books in question.”
Good for her. Shame its in Texas but I guess all those people moving here kind of screwed things up.