"We are targeting the LGBT books."
"We are targeting the LGBT books."
The faction that pushed to remove books from Victoria's Public Libraries is now setting its sights on the Victoria ISD board.
“We are targeting the LGBT books.”
It’s hard to find a clearer statement of intent than that sentence, which was posted in September of 2021 on the Facebook page of a Victoria, Texas group named Freedom Over Fear Citizens Unite. It was part of a call to action to group members to attend a meeting at Faith Family Church in Victoria, where they could learn how to “show up, support, and stand for our children.”
Though the post was made by another group member, the words purportedly came from the organizer of that meeting, Gay Patek, who had been added to Freedom Over Fear by the group’s founder, Tracy Hanes, a few days before. According to the poster, Patek’s message continued:
They are trying to indoctrinate our children in thinking this lifestyle is normal when it is not. They are also sexualizing our children. No nation has ever survived rampant immorality. None! And that’s what this is about, the Destruction of America. We have to fight.
At that point, Patek had been working for several months on what came to be known as “the Library Project,” which had burst into public view that summer as several citizens petitioned the Victoria Public Library—again, the public library, not Victoria schools—to remove dozens of books. The post that September marked the second phase of the project: after the library board rejected the challenges, the petitioners appealed 21 of the decisions in October, and accompanied those appeals with a months-long political push that eventually would result in threats by the county commissioners to eject the library from its building, the ousting of a respected library director, the installation of Patek and two allies on the library advisory board and, ultimately, a more restrictive and less inclusive library materials policy.
I bring up that early phase of Victoria’s extremists’ war on books for two reasons.
First, over the past twenty-one months, the origins of the Library Project have been whitewashed. Despite the group’s clear desire to rid the library of books with LGBTQ themes and characters—evident in the books they targeted and their own words—Victoria’s pro-censorship activists quickly learned to frame their complaints as being about inappropriate content, not identity. On a show discussing one contentious City Council meeting about the library, local radio host Bill Pozzi said, “I really don’t believe it’s about citizenship or disdain for the LGBT community. I don’t believe that. We just don’t want to pollute our kids’ minds with a bunch of sex—heterosexual, homosexual, erotic-sexual, whatever.”
On the same show, Pozzi’s guest argued that the massive effort to ban books from the library didn’t amount to a book ban, saying that it was about relocating the books within the library rather than removing them from the library. “The original thing was this does not need to be in children’s sections of the library,” he said, “and if it does, it definitely needs to be where it’s prohibited material that parents or guardians have to check out for the kids.” That’s false—while the petitioners did eventually settle for requesting relocations, every petitioner who appealed a book challenge in October of 2021 had initially asked for the book to be removed from the library.
What’s frightening is that the Victoria activists have been overwhelmingly successful, both in enacting their agenda and in papering over its ugly nature. All of the initial challenges failed, and the appeals were all rejected by the library board in late 2021. At a board meeting in February of 2022, library director Dayna Williams-Capone cited a statement on the Freedom to Read and the Library Bill of Rights. But by the end of 2022, activists had convinced the county commissioners court and the city council to apply pressure to the library board. In September, the city council appointed three new members to the library advisory board—all of whom, including Patek, had been among the book challengers of the original Library Project. Williams-Capone resigned in October.
In December, the reconstituted board wrote a new suggested collection policy for the city council to adopt. That policy forbade the purchase of any books for the juvenile collection that might include “images, illustrations, representations, or written descriptions of sexual conduct,” and anything that “introduces or promotes gender dysphoria” or “encourages a child younger than 18 years of age to consider elective procedures for gender transitioning.” In a particularly crafty move that new board member Sarah Zeller explained at the January city council meeting, the board included “young adult” novels under their juvenile rubric, ensuring that the library would be forbidden from buying books like Out of Darkness or All Boys Aren’t Blue.
The council rejected that change, meaning such books will be restricted to the adult area but might still be acquired for the library collection. And, on the advice of the council’s attorney, the council nixed the clauses on gender dysphoria and gender transitioning. But that’s a hollow victory: Mayor Jeff Bauknight made clear that the council interpreted the policy as excluding such material anyway. “I want to make sure that if we are going to take them out that we feel like the rest of the policy covers those two items,” he said, and council members took turns suggesting reasons they could still exclude material affirming trans characters or themes: it promotes negative mental health issues, it’s child abuse, it flouts community standards.
Finally, Bauknight settled the discussion by comparing information on trans life to glorification of serial murder: “It’s like you wouldn’t have a book in this section that would glorify a serial killer. Right? It’s not in the policy, though. But we all kind of know that that’s more of a mental health [issue] and it’s really a problem with that individual. So is that a community standard issue? The same type of mental health issue that gender dysphoria falls under?”
But not to worry: Bauknight also later insisted the policy was carefully designed to make sure “that we weren’t doing any discrimination, that we weren’t going against the 1st Amendment.”
Which brings me to the second reason it’s worthwhile to remember the origins of Victoria’s war on books: the same people are now turning the same ideological fervor to May’s school board election.
Front and center at the January City Council meeting was B.J. Nelson, who is running to be the trustee for District 3 on the Victoria ISD board. Nelson has the vocal support of Patek, and her family company, White Trash Services (yes, I know) sponsors Pozzi’s radio show, on which she is a regular guest.
Her biggest booster is Tracy Hanes, the leader of Freedom Over Fear Citizens Unite. Hanes has taken aim at the VISD board for some time, and even helped orchestrate an ouster of district deputy superintendent Michael Kuhrt in the summer of 2022. Along with Nelson, Hanes is throwing her support behind Rick Jones, an engineer without any obvious knowledge of or connection to Victoria ISD who was recruited to run after the January city council meeting, which he had attended “to help pray and to help support the committee” that proposed the new library policy.
I’ve written about the race in the Book-Loving Texan’s Guide to the May 2023 Elections. It’s vital to support the incumbents (Bret Baldwin and Tami Keeling) on the Victoria ISD board in May; otherwise, what has happened to the city’s public library could become the story of Victoria ISD.