Help Police, Kids are Reading Lawn Boy

Book challengers are not all that unusual. If they were, my work would be much less interesting. What is unusual is for the police to get involved. This is what made a recent report out of Leander, Texas, so interesting. CBS Austin reported that on 9 September 2021 Brandi Burkman - a parent who seems to have “spoken” to the school many times - showed up to complain about Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison. The story’s real hook, though, was that the police were involved and investigating. It turns out that the details are not quite as exciting but the event is a troubling look at where far right extremists are heading.

The video of the complaints can be found here, starting at about 1:20. Burkman attempts to put on a show having her son, who checked out the book from a Leander school or classroom library, and another person display visual aids while she issues a scathing rant about the books for three minutes. The visual aids seem to show some passages of the books primarily. The complained about elements are that the character in Lawn Boy recounts how he and a friend engaged in sexual contact when they were both 10. Oh and the book has dirty language - she happily provides the counts of fucks and shits for example. To Burkman this is the equivalent of encouraging pedophilia, though it isn’t clear why because she notes herself that the kids were both 10. And she seems unable to grasp that this is fiction. But none of this is unusual, I sadly see similar arguments so many times. Challengers regularly equate the fictional depiction of behavior they don’t like, but that occurs in the real world, with “grooming” children. What is different is the police getting involved.

From the CBS Austin report it sounds like the police have teams of detectives interrogating the content of library books in the schools. The police reports tell a slightly different story. It appears that Brandi and her compatriots were asked to leave the meeting when she refused to abide by the established rule of three minutes for each speaker - I’m sure she would describe herself as being cancelled. The police officers working security appear to have become exhausted with her and brought in another officer to deal with her. She expressed outrage at the content of the book and demanded to file a report. As the excerpt above notes, the reporting officer specifically told both women that removal of the book needed to go through district process and that he would file only a general information report. In fact the report references no criminal charges at all.

In the course of due diligence the information was forwarded to the prosecutors office for advice. As the above quote notes, that office rightly refused to take the complaint seriously. Burkman invoked - and I believe one of her visual aids may have referenced it - Texas Code 43.24 a pretty typical provision dealing with material harmful to minors. As I have talked about so many times (see here, here, and here), there is zero chance that any of these challenged books are obscene. There is no chance that Lawn Boy meets the definition at all but as the prosecutor noted the law also provides that provision by “a person having scientific, educational, governmental, or other similar justification” is a defense against these charges. Absent an Attorney General’s declaration that this book is legally obscene - a declaration that could not hold up in court - the only remedy was through civil courts, where the issue would also die quickly. The case report noted that it would remain inactive.

So what do I make of this controversy? On the one level everything worked as it should. The police took a nuisance report to try and mollify an irate and unreasonable person. They did minimal due diligence and found that the law supported no further action and took none. But the controversy speaks to the radicalization of the right in America. In the video, Burkman throws out a reference to “diversity” which is a clear nod to the Critical Race Theory nonsense where conservatives complain that any instruction about race and racism is itself inherently racist against white people. There is also a reference to ignoring the real security of children, which in the context of the broader meeting reads to me as a representation of anti-mask insanity that has grip so many. The real danger is the repeated references that this book is about pedophilia. While I’m not an expert in QAnon conspiracy theory, this strikes me as related. People radicalized into this theory are likely to continue to invoke extreme reactions to things they do not like. We can only hope that they limit themselves to the peaceful means of filing meaningless complaints with the police but I worry about violence from these unhinged fanatics.