The Cruelty Is the Point
Stay fresh, cheese bags!
"When I do not want to say things in real life I often say them here." — Mimi Smartypants
Fighting for hearts and minds
Stay fresh, cheese bags!
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post about book banning, featuring news and opinion roundups, personal observations, and reviews.
At some point, I’ll have to confess in one of my banned book posts that I’m not wholly on the lefty side of things. They’ll probably kick me off Daily Kos.
“This Book Is Gay” is one of a number of young adult books targeted by right-wing culture warriors. They view it, along with other LGBTQ-themed books, as insidious pro-gay propaganda designed to lure girls and boys into deviant sex and transgenderism. This book, in particular, billed as an “instruction manual” for LGBTQ youth (see the quote from the publisher’s blurb, above), is firmly in their crosshairs.
More and more, I see the pronoun people, like some members of the LGBTQI community, as participants in a giant game of Calvinball, scrambling to keep up with changing rules and shifting goalposts.
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post about book banning, featuring news and opinion roundups, personal observations, and reviews.
As to the challenges and bans taking place around the country as organized groups of reactionaries pretending to be parents disrupt school board meetings over “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” claiming it’s pornographic: no, it is anything but.
Ashley Hope Perez’s novel “Out of Darkness,” published in 2015, is a Romeo and Juliet story set against the backdrop of an actual historical event: the New London, Texas, school explosion of 1937, which killed more than 300 students and teachers.