COBB COUNTY, Ga. — Twenty-three books the Marietta City School Board voted to ban in December will remain banned in a 6 to 1 decision.

Tuesday’s decision came after a group of parents said they spent the holiday reading the banned books and filed appeals with the school board.

“There were some books where we said this is concerning to us and we are having a difficult time justifying the academic value,” said Superintendent Dr. Grant Rivera at Tuesday’s meeting.

Parents were on both sides at the meeting.

“How do you decide something is sexually explicit when they’ve already made that line with these very mild books,” said parent Courtney Bellman.

“If those scenes were put in a movie some of it would be X-rated, it would be so inappropriate,” said parent Becky Simmons.

The superintendent defended claims the banned books were disproportionately based on LGBTQ+ characters.

“If you actually look at the spilt and who is published, both queer authors as well as the characters, we are such a small percentage of what is published in the United States and that list was 30-40 percent, so we are actually over-represented in that list,” said author Mark Oshiro.

“Fifteen out of the 25 we put in a bucket of heterosexual relationships, so I do not think it’s accurate to say over half the books have LGBTQ+ themes,” said Rivera.

The question now is, will more books be added to the banned list?

“We’re hoping that this will be the end of it, that the book banners will take these sacrificial lambs and they will be happy with them and they will leave the rest of the books in the library alone,” said Karla Jacobs with Marietta in the Middle.

“My hope is this is not something we do every week, every month, every year,” said Rivera. “Going forward I’m eager to candidly move on.”

The Marietta City Schools superintendent defended how they handled the bans.

“There are districts around the country, not here in Marietta, where thousands of books have been removed. There are districts around the country, some close to Marietta where books are being removed in the middle of the night,” said Rivera. “For us, we haven’t tried to hide anything.”

“We chose to do it in a way, agree or disagree with the outcome that had integrity and transparency where we walked everybody through the process.”

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