Responding to parents’ long-standing concerns, state senators advanced Republican-priority legislation aimed at protecting Texas children from sexually explicit content at school by repealing “obscenity exemptions.”
Current law contains exemptions that let schools expose minors to obscene content under the guise of “educational” purposes.
Senate Bill 412 by State Sen. Mayes Middleton (R–Galveston), would remove the affirmative defense to distributing harmful sexual materials to students in schools.
“Protecting children from sexualization and obscene materials has to be a priority of this legislature,” said Middleton during a Senate Criminal Justice Committee hearing held Tuesday. “Increasing concern by parents has encouraged this call to action to close huge affirmative defense loopholes that allow harmful sexual material and sexual performance of a child.”
More than a dozen bills were filed last session to remove these exemptions, but none of them made it to committee.
Middleton said under SB 412, the only affirmative defense exceptions to the penal code for harmful material and sexual performance of a child are for judicial or law enforcement officers performing their official duties.
Several parents and advocates testified Tuesday in favor of closing the loopholes.
Christin Bentley, an East Texas mom who leads the Republican Party of Texas’ legislative effort to Stop Sexualizing Texas Kids, told the senators that as she travels the state, she asks two questions: “Is there ever a reason to give a child porn? Is there ever a reason to have a child perform sexually for an adult?”
“I always hear the same resounding answer: no. And yet Texas law says otherwise,” said Bentley. “Texans have zero tolerance for pedophiles, and that must be reflected in our laws. That’s the position of the Republican Party of Texas.”
Liz Case, a Republican activist and former Texas educator, testified that while the RPT platform calls for repealing the state’s obscenity exemptions, “these are just basic values of decent people, and they are held by people all across Texas.”
“It’s not a Republican or Democrat issue. This is a decency issue,” said Case.
Texas parent and conservative education advocate Deborah Simmons spoke to another part of the RPT platform: “Repeal all laws based on the fraudulent research by Dr. Alfred Kinsey.”
Simmons explained to the committee how Kinsey’s books on human sexual behavior, published in the 1940s and 50s, “informed the general public that children are sexual from birth, children are never harmed from any type of sexual activity, all sexual taboos and sex laws are routinely broken, therefore sex laws should be eliminated.”
According to Simmons, Kinsey’s work was used as the basis for the Model Penal Code, which Texas adopted in 1973.
Simmons said she first testified in favor of ending the exemptions six years ago.
“Kinsey’s reports have wreaked havoc on the American legal system, as well as education. Texas should repeal all Kinsey-based laws, and let’s start by repealing these defenses and cleaning up this code,” Simmons concluded.
Llano parent and children’s advocate Bonnie Wallace shared an example of the obscene content available in Texas school libraries, reading from the book Dead End by Jason Myers.
“In case you didn’t know it, there is very harmful content in school libraries all across Texas. I’m here today to tell you what very harmful content looks like,” she testified to the committee.
“This book is prohibited to Texas prisoners by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. You’ll soon understand why,” she said. “What’s harder to understand is why this content is allowed to Texas children.”
Committee chairman State Sen. Pete Flores (R–Pleasanton) quickly interrupted her reading.
“Here’s the problem,” Wallace responded. “People argue that there’s nothing obscene in our libraries. They are either deceivers or they’re stupid, because I have 961 books on my list.”
There’s very sick librarians, very sick writers, very sick publishers that put disclaimers on books and think that will absolve them from responsibility of harming and raping our children.
These books are not literary, they have no literary value, and they need to be removed.
“Imagine a teacher, coach, or librarian giving your child pornography, but that teacher being protected by the law,” testified Shannon Ayres, a Plano parent and state education director for the advocacy group Citizens Defending Freedom. “It’s hard to believe that this is Texas, but it is.”
Ayres said Texas school districts use obscenity exemptions to keep explicit materials in the hands of children.
“I’ve personally sat in school board meetings where administrators, board members, and their lawyers smugly cite these educational exemptions to justify keeping materials they themselves say are harmful and obscene,” she said. “In Lovejoy ISD, I watched as a board trustee—a lawyer—used these very loopholes to reassure the district that they were legally protected in providing materials they deemed harmful and obscene.”
While federal law strictly prohibits distributing obscene content to minors, Texas has created a shield for institutions and predators over the protection of children. These aren’t abstract legal technicalities. These are Texas children being exposed to obscene material, in Texas school districts hiding behind these exemptions to provide it.
“The time for action to repeal these affirmative defenses is now,” Ayres concluded. “Our children deserve better protections, or lawmakers who won’t compromise their safety. Because when giving porn to a child is considered acceptable in the law under any circumstance, then the law itself has become obscene.”
Committee members voted 6-0 to send HB 412 to the full Senate for consideration.
Last week, the Senate Committee on Education K-16 heard public testimony on nearly a dozen bills designed to protect parental rights in education, including a measure to strengthen safeguards against sexually explicit books in school libraries.
