A school board meeting in Texas last week took a bizarre turn when a parent made some striking statements about her own sexual experience in order to attack educators whom she accused of promoting vulgar material to children.
A routine Lake Travis Independent School District board meeting about finances and covid protocols went off the rails when incensed local mother Kara Bell began reading an excerpt from a book found on middle school shelves.
Bell was upset that a passage from the 2015 young adult novel “Out of Darkness” by Ashley Hope Pérez depicted “cornholing,” which she later found out was a euphemism for anal sex.
“I’ve never had anal sex. I don’t want to have anal sex. I don’t want my kids having anal sex,” she said.
A video showing Bell’s blunt comments has since racked up nearly 100,000 views.
Prior to disclosing her own lack of experience in the area, Bell indicated to the board how she had pieced together the meaning in the words of the book that educators were promoting with kids, some as young as 11.
“Not going to lie, I had to Google ‘cornhole’ because I have the game in my backyard,” she said.
“But according to Wikipedia, ‘cornhole’ is a sexual slang vulgarism for anus.
“In verb form ‘to cornhole,’ which came into usage in the 1930s, means to have anal sex.
“I do not want my children to learn about anal sex in middle school.”
The mother’s microphone was switched off, but it didn’t stop her making an impassioned plea for the books to be removed from the libraries of Hudson Bend Middle School and Bee Cave Middle School.
“I want you to start focusing on education and not public health,” she chastised the education officials.
The book is described as a fictional reimagining of the 1937 New London school explosion that killed more than 295 people “as a backdrop for a riveting novel about segregation, love, family, and the forces that destroy people.” Austin news outlet KXAN reported the Lake Travis Independent School District pulled the book from its school libraries after the mother’s complaint.
“A district possesses significant discretion to determine the content of its school libraries,” a spokesperson told KXAN.
“A district must, however, exercise its discretion in a manner consistent with the First Amendment.”