Dispatches from Dallas, April 28 edition

This is a weekly feature produced by my friend Ginger. Let us know what you think.

This week in news from the DFW area, book bans (local and statewide), election administration, some scary climate predictions for Galveston, more Six Degrees of Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, a local is running for president in 2024, and zoo babies are back!

Also early voting for the May 6 election has started, so get out there and vote in your local elections, fellow Texans. May elections have a low turnout so your vote is important!

Today we’re going to talk about book banning in Texas schools. In case you want to know what’s banned in your local districts, PEN America has a database of school book bans for fall 2022. Frisco ISD is the big north Texas book banner right now, with about 5 of the 9 pages in the index that are devoted to Texas book bans devoted to Frisco’s removals. If that sounds like a lot, it is, and the numbers are increasing: ALA: Number of unique book titles challenged jumped nearly 40% in 2022.

And that’s just the local districts, not getting into the shenanigans the Lege is up to this year: Texas education board could ban textbooks that discuss gender identity under proposed bill. That’s HB 1804 for those of you calling your legislators. Also in the Lege, the House passed HB 900 and Franklin Strong’s Substack post on it is worth your time. He summarizes the discussion based on five points. Three are by Representative Erin Zweiner, who rightfully draws the lines connecting this years book bans (sex and gender) with last year’s book bans (“CRT”). Two are by Representative Jerry Patterson, who sponsored this bill. Patterson represents Frisco ISD, which as we noted above, has removed a lot of books from classrooms and libraries this school year. (We talk about Frisco ISD a lot around here. It’s also where Marvin Lowe, who harassed a transgender student at TASB, is a trustee.)

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