AUSTIN (KXAN) — The Texas Senate approved legislation that would strip public funding for any library that hosts a children’s reading event led by a drag performer.
Senate Bill 18 passed Wednesday along a strictly party line vote of 20-11. The measure is similar to one that sailed through the Senate during the last regular legislative session in 2023, but it failed to get a vote in the House. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick released a statement expressing hope that this time could be different.
“SB 18 puts an end to the practice of using taxpayer dollars for drag time story hours,” Patrick wrote in his statement. “Libraries should not be used to advance radical ideology at the expense of children. This is the second consecutive session the Texas Senate passed this bill. I am optimistic that our new speaker, Dustin Burrows, will finally pass this important bill so it becomes law.”
Now that SB 18 has cleared this hurdle, it will head to consideration in the House, where it’s unclear whether lawmakers will take up the measure there.
The bill, introduced by Republican Sen. Bryan Hughes of Mineola, proposes that a “municipal library may not receive state or other public funds if the library hosts an event at which a man presenting as a woman or a woman presenting as a man reads a book or a story to a minor for entertainment and the person being dressed as the opposite gender is a primary component of the entertainment.” Additionally, that funding freeze would take effect during the fiscal year that follows whenever the drag story time event happened.
Before the final vote in the Senate happened Wednesday, Hughes said this legislation is necessary to protect children, noting that Texas public libraries hosting a drag story time for kids would result in a loss of taxpayer funding.
“We recognize that adults have great liberty to express themselves in many ways, as they see fit. It’s always going to be that way in America,” Hughes said. “Where children are involved, there’s a proper, necessary and essential role of the society, of the people, of the government to step in.”
However, Sen. Molly Cook, a Houston Democrat and the first openly LGBTQ+ state senator, called the legislation a “painful attack” on the state’s LGBTQ+ community as well as unconstitutional.
“It is bad policy to take resources away from our communities and libraries as a punishment. Personal preferences do not and cannot strip away First Amendment protection. This is government overreach,” Cook said Wednesday. “The government has no business telling people what clothes they should wear, and as the federal courts have shown, drag shows are a form of constitutionally-protected speech, and government cannot unconstitutionally censor expression based on its message, ideas or content. By moving legislation like this, we are shaving away the rights and culture of the LGBTQ+ community. By vilifying drag, we are mischaracterizing the gay community and putting us at risk. We are not a threat, and we deserve the same rights as everyone else.”
Hughes’ previous proposal that aimed to penalize libraries for holding drag story time events, Senate Bill 1601, got passed by the Texas Senate two years ago, garnering support from all the Republican lawmakers at that time. However, no committee in the House ever took up the bill, which led to the legislation dying in the 88th regular legislative session and not becoming law.
During that session, state lawmakers put forward a historic number of bills impacting the LGBTQ+ community, which the KXAN Investigates team examined closely for the Catalyst project entitled “OutLaw: A Half-Century Criminalizing LGBTQ+ Texans.”
