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This article was produced in collaboration with nbc news.
You are reading: Granbury isd banned books
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weston brown was browsing twitter last month when he came across a video that made his chest tighten. It showed a woman at a school board meeting in North Texas, asking district leaders to apologize.
“regret is the word on my heart,” he said near the beginning of the video.
For months, the woman in the video had been demanding that the granbury independent school district ban dozens of books containing depictions of sexual or lgbtq themes from its libraries, books she believed could harm the hearts and minds of students. students. . Dissatisfied after a district committee she served on voted to remove just a handful of titles, the woman filed a police report in May accusing school employees of providing child pornography, prompting a criminal investigation by the county. from hood.
Now, in the video Weston found online, he was telling the school board that a local Christian pastor, rather than librarians, should decide what books should be allowed on public school shelves. “He would never mislead you,” he said.
The clip ended with the woman walking away from the lectern and the audience showering her with applause.
weston, 28, said his heart was racing as he watched and rewatched the video, and not just because he opposes censorship. she instantly recognized the speaker.
It was her mother, Monica Brown.
the same woman, he said, who had removed pages from science books when he was a child to prevent him and his siblings from seeing illustrations of the male and female anatomy. the woman who had always warned that reading the wrong books or watching the wrong movies could open the door to sinful temptation. and the one, he said, effectively separated him from his family four years ago after he came out as gay.
“You are not invited to our house for Thanksgiving or any other meal,” his mother had texted him in November 2018, eight months after he revealed his sexual orientation to his parents .
weston, who lives with her partner in san diego, had long ago accepted the idea that she would never have a meaningful relationship with her parents again. he still loved them and desperately missed his younger siblings, he said, but he no longer tried to convince his mom and her dad that his sexuality was neither a choice nor a sin. he was done challenging his religious beliefs and praying they would change.
until he saw the video of his mother at a school board meeting.
In recent months, Weston has seen the same fundamental disagreements that tore his family apart begin to divide entire communities. Driven by a growing movement to affirm conservative Christian values at all levels of government, activists across the country have fought to remove queer-affirming books from schools, repeal same-sex marriage rights, shut down lgbtq pride celebrations and pass state laws that limit the ways teachers can talk about gender and sexuality.
As much as seemingly intractable arguments about America’s response to the pandemic and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election have led to fractured personal relationships in recent years, these clashes over gender and sexuality have pitted neighbors against neighbors, parents against teachers and, in the case of the dark-haired ones: a son against his mother.
“It was one thing when my parents’ beliefs were causing this rift between us and it was just a family matter,” Weston said. “But now that he’s applying those same insights to public activism, at a time when so many basic rights are being called into question, I couldn’t keep quiet about it.”
Monica, 51, who has homeschooled her nine children and serves as director of a private Christian education cooperative, declined to be interviewed or answer written questions. In a series of email exchanges with NBC News, she initially invited a reporter to discuss the story over dinner at her home in Granbury, but in a subsequent message, said her husband would not allow the meeting, adding, “I have been informed not to talk to you at all. Her husband also refused to be interviewed.
Monica has publicly denied targeting lgbtq books. At a recent school board meeting, she said her sole goal has been to protect children from sexually explicit content, gay or otherwise.
“there’s nothing lgbtq involved in this,” he said. “There are lgbtq books that are sexually explicit, yes. they are wrong too. if it’s between men and men, women and women, cats and women, dogs and women, whatever, that’s not appropriate educational content.”
however, that statement is inconsistent with many of the books she has marked for checkout in granbury. Several of the titles on her list feature LGBTQ stories, but do not contain sexually explicit content. which includes Raina Telgemeier’s “Drama,” a graphic novel featuring gay and bisexual characters navigating the routine awkwardness of high school crushes.
Of the nearly 80 library books Monica and her supporters want removed, 3 out of 5 feature lgbtq characters or themes, according to an nbc news analysis of titles posted on granburytexasbooks.org, a website where activists have collected parent reviews of books they want banned. In addition to sexually explicit content, the site calls for the books to be removed for “normalizing lesbianism,” focusing on “sexual orientation,” and promoting “alternative gender ideologies.”
Monica has also flagged anti-LGBTQ views in formal library book challenges she sent directly to Granbury School officials, according to copies of the forms obtained through a public records request. In one case, she criticized a biography of notable women in part because it included the story of Christine Jorgensen, a trans woman who made national headlines in the 1950s for speaking openly about her gender-confirmation surgery. She suggested replacing that book with a series of Christian biographies about girls and women who used their talents to serve God—”biographies of really great Americans,” she wrote.
After watching the video of her mother at the school board last month, Weston flipped through excerpts from the books she wanted to check out. it seemed to her that she and her followers were pressuring public schools to adhere to some of the same strict religious ideologies that he says he suffered from as a child.
He thought of all the students, in Granbury and across the country, who could benefit from reading the kinds of books that were off limits to him growing up.
with tears in his eyes, he began typing a tweet on the afternoon of July 3rd.
“This is my mom,” he wrote, with a link to the video of the school board meeting. “Seeing her advocate for the erasure of queer representation is crushing. coming soon on the fifth anniversary of being effectively separated from my family and siblings after coming out in 2018.”
He hesitated, knowing he would be reopening old wounds for the world to see. he didn’t want to do anything to hurt the woman who had raised him, he said.
but trying to arrest the librarians?
weston added one more line to his post: “much love to those who stand up and fight for representation,” along with a rainbow flag emoji. and then pressed submit.
“the rejection you have chosen”
weston has many fond memories of growing up in the suburbs between dallas and fort worth, about an hour from his parents’ current home in granbury. He recalled summer days splashing in his backyard pool, family ski vacations in Colorado, and hours spent at the public library with his mother, who fostered his love of reading.
“I didn’t really have any friends growing up, and making new friends through fictional characters was always something I looked forward to,” he said. “It was a beautiful way to leave my world and go to a better place.”
But in a conservative Christian home, some content was off limits.
Although the brown family’s shelves were filled with classics, such as books by c.s. In Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” series, many popular titles were banned, Weston said. That included the Harry Potter series, which he said his mother, like many other conservative Christians, considered a satanic portrayal of witchcraft.
Weston, the oldest son, said his mother also went to great lengths to protect him and his siblings from words or images that might arouse sexual curiosity. he recalled being told to look at the floor every time they passed the women’s underwear section in a department store. Even when he was a boy, he said, he was more intrigued by the marketing photos displayed in the men’s section, though he didn’t dare tell anyone.
The lessons on purity didn’t end after he became an adult.
In 2015, when he was 20 years old and still living with his parents, he came home late one night after watching “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” a 13-year-old superhero movie that his mother disapproved of. When she walked into her kitchen, she said, she found two trays of brownies waiting for him, along with a stack of articles printed on the Internet about the corrosive influence of Marvel comics and movies.
A brownie platter was average. the other had a label warning that it had been baked with a small amount of dog poop mixed in.
“why anyone? Just a little?” Monica wrote later when she posted a picture of the brownies on facebook. “How much yuck is too much?”
the moral of the illustration, which is popular with some evangelical Christians: If you wouldn’t eat brownies that could harm your body, why would you expose yourself to movies, books, or music that could harm your soul?
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Your son was upset, but didn’t take back the lesson.
“She made her point,” he said, “and we never spoke of it again.”
that was the same year that the us. the supreme court legalized same-sex marriage, a tectonic cultural development that unsettled many evangelical Christians. Subsequently, Monica frequently posted on social media about the “dangerous” gay agenda that she believed was underway in the US mainstream. uu. society. warned in posts that disney was secretly promoting lgbtq lifestyles in children in movies like “toy story 4” and shared a link to a video that alleged pop star katy perry was conspiring with satanic forces to convince teens to embrace homosexuality.
weston said he didn’t question his mother’s views while living with her. she had spent years struggling to reconcile her desires with the religious values her parents had instilled in her, trying to convince herself that the butterflies in her stomach whenever she was around one of the kids at church were just something friends felt the pain of. one for the other. It didn’t help, he told her, that she had no significant sex education as a teenager, just a general instruction to abstain until marriage, and that she didn’t understand lgbtq identities or what those letters stood for.
But in 2018, he was 23, living alone, and finally confident enough to tell his parents what he always knew about himself.
“Dear Mom and Dad, I am writing this to share something I wanted to share with you but have held back for a long time,” he wrote in an email to his parents in February 2018. “It is with great relief, clarity and vulnerability that I share this with you: I am gay.”
end note: “I pray you receive this with an open mind.”
That prayer, he said, went unanswered.
For the next year and a half, he said, his parents tried to convince him he was wrong. Through a series of emotional lunches, phone calls and text messages, he said, they urged him to see a Christian counselor in the hope that he could learn to overcome his homosexual urges. They invited Weston to church, the only place he would be allowed to see his younger siblings, and openly wondered what corrupting influences might have led his son down this sinful path.
For months, her mother sent her links to articles on Christian news sites with headlines like “evidence shows sexual orientation can change” and “it’s not gay to straight, it’s safe lost,” links she was simultaneously posting on facebook. But after Weston made it clear that no prayer or summer camp would change who he is, he said his parents made it clear that he wasn’t welcome in his house, even on holidays or birthdays.
“You are not rejected, not at all, and you never will be,” her father, James Brown, texted her in October 2019, more than a year after she came out. “The lifestyle you have chosen is against God and therefore that is the rejection you have chosen.”
Her father added, “Have you ever considered the pain you’ve put your mother and me through?”
That same day, Monica sent him a message on facebook to tell him that she was praying for the dark forces to be cast out of him.
“I’m specifically dealing with the evil that has entered you in the movie ‘it,'” he wrote, referring to the time when Weston, around age 10, had watched part of Stephen King’s miniseries about a killer clown. . “the clown demons have to go in the mighty name of jesus.”
she finished the message, “I love you, mom.”
“a raging fire”
monica brown’s campaign to rid schools of books she considers obscene began late last year with a trip to the granbury high school library, which sometimes hosts robotics competitions in which her students have competed. homeschooled children.
She started flipping through some books while there and was disturbed by what she found, according to an interview she recorded in May with The Blue Shark Show, a local far-right internet talk show hosted by a former Republican state legislator. .
“What I saw was negative, dark, stuff nightmares are made of,” Monica said, without sharing any further details.
His sudden interest in library books coincided with a wave of similar book ban attempts across the country last year amid a growing conservative backlash against school curricula and lessons dealing with racism, gender and sexuality.
The books that have drawn the most intense scrutiny, both in Granbury and nationally, are mostly young adult novels and memoirs that contain passages with explicit descriptions of sex or rape, especially those that feature LGBTQ themes and characters. . Proponents of these books argue that any sexual content is presented in the context of larger narratives that help teens understand and process the world around them.
The fight has been particularly heated in Texas, where Republican state officials, including Govt. Greg Abbott, have gone so far as to bring criminal charges against any school staff member who provides children with access to novels, memoirs, and sex education books that some conservatives have labeled “pornography.”
Monica did not say in her talk show interview if she had reported her concerns to the school district. But in early January, Granbury Schools Superintendent Jeremy Glenn called a meeting with district librarians and shared that he had begun receiving complaints about library books.
“Let’s just call it what it is, and I’m going to cut to the chase on a lot of this,” Glenn told librarians, according to a secret recording of the meeting obtained by NBC News, ProPublic and the Texas Tribune and first reported in March. “It’s transgender, lgbtq and sex, sexuality, in books. that’s why the governor has said that he will prosecute people, and that’s what we’re getting out.”
When asked about his comments, Glenn released a statement in March saying the district was committed to supporting students of all backgrounds. And while he said the district’s primary focus is educating students, Glenn said “our community’s values will always be reflected in our schools.”
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In the days following the meeting, district employees removed more than 130 books from the school library’s shelves and announced the formation of a volunteer committee to review them.
Monica was one of the first designated residents. From the beginning, she felt the process was a sham, she told her in her interview with Blue Shark. The first two meetings were held at times when she couldn’t attend, she said, and by the time she got to the third meeting, the committee had already voted to return most of the books to the shelves.
“That meeting completely broke down in the sense that we didn’t vote because I kept asking questions,” he said.
In the end, over her and another member’s objections, the volunteer committee voted to ban just three books: “This Book Is Gay,” a guide for lgbtq teens by transgender author juno dawson that includes detailed descriptions of sex; Ashley Hope Perez’s “Out of the Dark,” a young adult novel about a romance between a Mexican-American girl and a black boy that includes a rape scene and other mature content; and “We Are the Ants” by Shaun David Hutchinson, a coming-of-age novel about a gay teenager that includes sexually explicit language.
the district returned dozens of other titles to the shelves. several of the books had no sexual content, the committee found. for the others, most committee members believed that any description of sex was age-appropriate when read in its full context.
monica was outraged, she said on the blue shark show in early may.
“I think they’re breaking the law,” he said.
That same week, he put that belief to the test. On May 2, she and another disillusioned member of the book committee filed a police report with Hood County Sheriff Chad Jordan alleging that the district was making pornography available to students, according to a copy of the incident report. Four days later, Hood County deputies visited Granbury High School to investigate the claim.
in a letter sent to nbc news on Wednesday and dated August. On January 1, Jordan said his office was unable to release additional information about the case because the investigation was still active. In a statement released in May, Glenn, the Granbury superintendent, said the school district was cooperating with police.
In the months since then, Monica has continued to keep up the pressure, speaking at every school board meeting, submitting more than a dozen additional book challenges, and in the process becoming a prominent and polarizing figure. in granbury.
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her activism has been praised by several leading conservative figures in the city, including members of the hood county republican party and melanie jerk, a school board member who selected monica to serve on the book review committee. Graft, who rose to local fame in 2015 while leading a conservative campaign to remove LGBTQ-themed picture books from the children’s section of the Granbury Public Library, did not respond to messages requesting an interview.
monica’s struggle has also taken a personal toll. In social media posts and public comments, he said the hours he spent checking library books forced him to sacrifice time with his family and prompted a spate of personal attacks from residents opposed to his efforts. /p>
In May, Adrienne Martin, a Granbury mother and chairwoman of the Hood County Democratic Party, was recording on her phone as she confronted Monica outside a school board meeting.
“You want the librarians arrested,” Martin said as Monica walked away. “That is fascism. you’re a fascist.”
at a board meeting last month, monica tried to explain why she fought so hard to remove the books from a school district her kids don’t attend. she’s doing it, she said, for all the other kids.
“I feel like it’s a raging fire,” he told the board, “and I have a water gun.”
“I pray for you”
After Weston’s initial post criticizing his mother, he launched several tweets denouncing his efforts in Granbury.
It wasn’t long before the posts reached their parents. her father sent him a text message demanding that he apologize to her mother.
“we have not spoken out against the lgbt community,” his father wrote, insisting that his efforts in granbury schools focused on “pornography” and nothing more. “I know you’re hurt by our decisions, but we’re hurt too and have been since you said you were gay.
“We have not been hateful to you,” his father added.
weston replied, “all i can say is i pity you and wish you well.”
Soon, opponents of Monica’s efforts began posting images of her son’s tweets to the Granbury community’s Facebook groups, publicizing a family’s private breakup.
“Call your son and leave ours alone!” A woman wrote in response to one of Monica’s many public posts about raunchy library books.
“Your crusade against books will not bring your son back or straighten him out,” another granbury resident wrote. “go home and look in the mirror, fix your house before worrying about others.”
Monica never publicly addressed her son’s tweets, but in response to a Facebook post about them, she wrote: “you can believe what you want about me. In the meantime, I will continue to do my best to end my life for an audience of one.”
A couple of weeks later, he finally got in touch with his son. Two days after NBC News contacted her to request an interview, she texted him to inform him that she did not plan to share “personal family details” with a reporter.
“I didn’t speak out against lgbtq at all, ever,” she wrote, before adding, “I love you and pray for you.”
Weston studied the message, remembering all the hours he’d spent begging her to accept him for who he is instead of trying to control and change him. it hurt that the woman who had given birth to him told him that his sexual orientation was an abomination.
He didn’t want to relive that trauma, he said. he just wanted his mother to stop imposing her beliefs on other people’s children.
Weston went back to reading his text message one more time. he started to write a response, then stopped. instead, he closed the message and put his phone aside.
He had already told his mother everything he had to say.
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