A few months into last year’s legislative session, Democratic state representative Erin Zwiener, whose district is just south of Austin, pulled her colleague Jared Patterson aside to inform him that a bill he authored was unconstitutional. The legislation written by Patterson, a Republican representing a district north of Dallas, would have required vendors that sell books to schools to rate each one based on its depictions of or references to sex—and to recall already-delivered works that they had rated “explicit.” The bill enjoyed broad support: more than half of Republicans in the Texas House cosigned it, as did one Democrat. But Zwiener warned Patterson—both publicly and privately—that his bill considers “obscene” a far more expansive category of books than courts have found acceptable under the…
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