LLANO, Texas — The fate of a small-town Texas library system hung in the balance Thursday as the Llano County commissioners prepared to decide whether to comply with a judge’s order to restore the books they banned — or shut the library down altogether.
Already there have been signs that the commissioners, stung by a federal judge’s ruling that they violated the Constitution by yanking a dozen or so mostly children’s books from the shelves, might mothball all three branches of a library system that has served several generations of Llano residents for nearly a century.
“We’re really concerned they might just shut the libraries down,” Leila Green Little, one of seven people who successfully sued the county for banning the books, told NBC News ahead of the meeting.
“Our library system was started over a 100 years ago by a group of Llano County women who used to meet by our river to read books,” Little added. “That was the humble start of our library system. And if they were to shut it down, it would absolutely be the end of a key piece of our county’s history.”
Ominously, when the commissioners scheduled the special meeting, the first item on the agenda was whether to “continue or cease operations” at the library.
Also, as part of the discovery for the lawsuit they filed against the county on April 25, 2022, Little and the other book-banning opponents uncovered a text message that Bonnie Wallace, who is vice chairman of the Llano County Library Advisory Board and an ally of the commissioners, sent to one of their supporters.
It read, in part, “the judge has said, if we lose the injunction, he will CLOSE the library because he WILL NOT put the porn back in the kid’s section!”
The judge that Wallace was referring to is Llano County Judge Ron Cunningham. And neither Wallace nor the judge returned phone calls from NBC News seeking elaboration.
Wallace, in her text message, did not make clear which books she or the judge consider to be “porn.”
But the debate…
Read the full article here