Biden administration investigates school district after it was busted banning LGBTQ+ books

The U.S. Department of Education has launched an investigation into a Texas school district after a recording was leaked of its superintendent ordering librarians to remove LGBTQ+ books from shelves.

Leaked audio from a meeting between Granbury Independent School District superintendent Jeremy Glenn and a group of librarians revealed staunchly anti-LGBTQ+ motives behind the district’s attempt to remove books from school shelves.

“There are two genders. There’s male, and there’s female. And I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women. And there are women that think they’re men. And again, I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries,” Glenn said, according to an investigation by the Texas Tribune and ProPublica.

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“It’s the transgender, LGBTQ, and the sex — sexuality — in books. That’s what the governor has said that he will prosecute people for, and that’s what we’re pulling out,” the superintendent continued.

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In July, the ACLU filed a complaint with the Department of Education accusing the district of violating Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits schools from discriminating on the basis of sex, gender, and sexual orientation. The department’s Office for Civil Rights informed the district of the investigation on December 6.

According to The Texas Tribune, education and legal experts say the investigation by the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights appears to be the first such investigation explicitly tied to the nationwide movement to ban school library books dealing with sexuality and gender.

“In this case it was made very clear, because the superintendent kind of said the quiet part out loud,” Chloe Kempf, an ACLU attorney, said. “It’s pretty clear that that kind of motivation is animating a lot of these policies nationwide.”

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