Dan Patrick Is “Coming For the Books”

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick held a press conference at the Texas Capitol on Wednesday and announced that he’s going to punish every Texas public school that refuses to remove books he considers “vulgar.” His idea is to dock a school an entire letter grade in its state performance rating (the same rating that the state uses to trigger takeovers of local districts) unless they took the ‘offending’ books off the shelves. All it would take is a single “wrong” book on a shelf on any of Texas’s more than 9,000 campuses to initiate the takeover. Here’s video from the Houston Chronicle with him speaking on it:

“We’re coming for the books.” - Dan Patrick

Sounds fascist-y.

Patrick focused on four books at the presser but the one everyone’s talking about is Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan. It’s a 240-page sex ed novel published in 2021, marketed for readers 14 and up, and it covers puberty, consent, gender, sexuality, and body image. He also showcased Boy Toy by Barry Lyga, Crank by Ellen Hopkins, and Push by Sapphire (the novel that the film Precious was based on).

These are books DAN PATRICK considers vulgar. Since when do any of us care what HE considers vulgar…why does the Lieutenant Governor of Texas get to decide what’s vulgar and what’s not? I could give less of a sh*t what a Christian nationalist who won’t let his own wife read the book he’s holding in his hand says.

Patrick said the books on display were “so filthy, so dirty, so vulgar, so pornographic” that he “refused to open them out of respect for the women in the room.” He said he wouldn’t “even show his wife”. He says he passed the bill without even showing the female Senators. That shriveled up prune is saying that grown women lawmakers at the Texas Capitol are too delicate and fragile to look at the pages of a young adult book that teenagers have been reading in schools since 2021. Men can handle what’s in the books but women can’t Dan? You can’t show your wife a book about sex ed, Dan? Men, meanwhile, are apparently fine to look at whatever’s inside *rolls eyes*. So Dan Patrick only feels comfortable showing ‘pornographic’ material to men? Got it.

Every single law he backs and everything that comes out of his mouth is sexist. This is the guy who presides over the Texas Senate and is the second most powerful position in the state. He’s out there dictating information of what men can handle, and what women can’t handle. I’m not interested.

Has he heard how his bestie Trump speaks and tweets? Mister, “grab em by the p***y?” If someone read his tweets on live television, they’d get hit with enough FCC violations to be taken off air. But here’s Danny boy clutching pearls over sex education books.

If Dan Patrick actually believes that books with sexual content is too vulgar for women and children to read, I’ve got one that’ll make his head spin. Let me quote a few passages from that book, which is still on the book shelves while Let’s Talk About It gets pulled from the library:

Ezekiel 23:19-21 (the story of Oholibah): “there she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses. Thus thou calledst to remembrance the lewdness of thy youth, in bruising thy teats by the Egyptians for the paps of thy youth.”

Genesis 19:8 (Lot offering his two virgin daughters to the mob outside his house): “Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes.”

1 Samuel 18:25-27 (the story of David bringing King Saul 200 Philistine foreskins as a bride price for Michal): “David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king’s son in law.”

Song of Solomon 1:2-4 (erotic love poetry): “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine. Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee. Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers.”

Meanwhile the sex ed book that has age-appropriate consent chapters, gets pulled off the shelf.

Patrick’s dodge on the word “ban” was, and I’m not kidding, this: “There are no books banned in America. You can buy any book you want to buy if you want it, but we do not take taxpayer money and buy these books for our schools.” When you pull a book off the shelf and you threaten the school’s state funding if they don’t comply, and you make that book functionally unavailable to 5.5 million students, IT IS A BAN.

Dan Patrick is pearl-clutching about a sex ed book because he has no real record he can run on. He and Abbott just rammed through a THC ban that gutted an industry Texas had built out over years, cost the state millions in tax revenue, and put small hemp businesses across the state into a survival-mode lawsuit. This is the first time I’ve had non-voters reach out to me and ask me how we undo what he’s done because Dan’s not going to bring that industry back. He’s not going to give people their jobs back. He’s not going to fix the electric grid, or the maternal wards that are closing, or the rural hospitals that have shut down. So instead he gets in front of a camera with four young adult novels and pretends he’s handling serious business.

What happened to parent’s rights? I thought Republicans built their whole brand around that? That was the pitch for vouchers, that was the whole pitch for banning race and gender curriculum, that was the whole pitch for CRT hearings, but now suddenly the parents in question might want their kid to have access to books that Patrick doesn’t like. Suddenly one loser’s personal opinion overrides every parent in Texas. Texas Republicans always need to have more say than anybody else, especially when what parents want isn’t what they want.

One reason I keep writing about this stuff is that Dan Patrick is up for re-election in November and Vikki Goodwin, a state rep from Austin, is running against him. She’s up two points on him in the most recent polling since the THC ban took effect. She takes the opposite position from Dan on everything, including legalizing THC. This is a very winnable race. Goodwin has been a champion of public education, teacher pay, and public funding for schools. She’s the exact opposite of the man who wants to yank books out of a school library.

One more thing before I go…do you know what happens when you ban a book from a school library? Kids find it and read it faster than they would have otherwise because that’s what kids do. You ban something and suddenly they need to figure out why. Also, they have this cool thing called the internet where EVERYTHING is accessible. Whatever you keep indoctrinating kids with will eventually be counterproductive. Everything this administration is doing right now is exactly how I became the person I am today. I started college at Houston Baptist University (now Houston Christian University) and since then I have been on a spiritual journey. All it took was for them to mandate a few religious classes, and force me to do church hours to graduate and here we are.

I wish someone would make Dan Patrick read “Let’s Talk About It”. Genuinely, he’d probably be a happier person (and so would his wife). I’m so tired of Republicans and their useless culture war propaganda. He may be focused on getting “dirty, filthy and vulgar” books out of our school libraries but I want to get dirty, filthy, and vulgar people, like him and Dear Leader, out of government.

1. Read the Texas Tribune coverage of Wednesday’s press conference.

2. Go to your local school board meeting when they talk about book removals. Public pressure is a real plus at these meetings.

3. Support Vikki Goodwin’s campaign for Lieutenant Governor. She’s up two on Dan Patrick in the polls.

4. Buy the banned books and read them. Give them to your kids, give them to your friends’ kids, buy a copy for your public library. Books are meant to be read, not banned.

5. Early voting in Texas runs October 19 through October 30 and includes a Saturday and Sunday in most counties.

6. Register to vote. Head to votetexas.gov, fill out the application, print it, sign it, and mail it to your county elections office, or drop it off in person. No printer? The same site lets you request a postage-paid paper application by mail. Get it postmarked by October 5, the deadline for the November 3 election.

7. On November 3, vote Vikki Goodwin for Lieutenant Governor against Dan Patrick. Vote Gina Hinojosa for Governor against Greg Abbott. Vote James Talarico for U.S. Senate against Ken Paxton. Vote Ben Flores for Land Commissioner. Vote Democrat down-ballot.

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