When Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared a war on “woke” earlier this year with a proposal that would require booksellers to rate texts before selling them to school districts, he caught the attention of a small wholesaler in St. Louis who feared that his industry would be decimated.
“We’re not book raters — we’re booksellers,” said Benjamin Conn, the owner of Classroom Library Company and the president of the Educational Book and Media Association, a group of 150 distributors nationwide that sell books to schools. “It would be like if Paramount came out with a movie and every theater had to rate it themselves.”
The trade association hired a lobbyist, who negotiated with Texas officials on behalf of an alternative version of the measure, Conn told ABC News, but to no avail. In response to a lawsuit brought by booksellers, a federal judge last month temporarily blocked Texas from enforcing the law, leaving the ultimate regulation uncertain.
“It has never been as bad as it is now,” Conn said, noting that Texas schools account for as much as $40 million in revenue for some wholesalers and the move could prompt adoption in other states. “It’s a mess. This has ground business to a halt.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Abbott told ABC News that he has led Texas to a period of strong economic growth, in part through his support for small businesses.
“Small businesses are a key part of the Texas economic juggernaut, with 99.8% of Texas businesses being small and employing nearly half of all working Texans,” Spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris said.
While Fortune 500 corporations like Disney, Target and Anheuser-Busch draw attention as high-profile targets of anti-LGBTQ+ backlash, a lesser known but wide-ranging set of small businesses has been thrust into the nation’s culture wars.
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