You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups.
In 1966, the school board in Hanover County, Virginia, voted unanimously to remove all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird from school libraries. Harper Lee herself responded with an offer to cover the costs of enrolling members of the school board in any first grade reading class of their choice.
A librarian writes about selecting books:
Pressures from the right and left are different. Libraries don’t usually hear from the right until people want a book removed from the collection. These complaints are usually related to sex, language, and violence. The pressure from the left is often more nuanced, having to do with race, cultures, and gender issues, and tends to influence purchases.
Another challenge to Huckleberry Finn, this time in Tracy, California. The complaining parent wanted the book replaced with a bowdlerized version, but the school district superintendent labeled controversy over the classic novel a “dead issue” and will keep the book on school library shelves.
In Canada, a comedian has been forced to appear before a government human rights tribunal investigating one of his jokes. This bears watching.
Good news from Virginia, where the governor this week vetoed HB 516, which would have forced teachers and school districts to label books as “sexually explicit” over even single passages taken out of context. During the debate over the proposed Virginia bill, a school teacher wrote to a state senator to defend the teaching of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. The response from the state senator is LOL funny:
That book is so vile—so profoundly filthy—that when a Senator rose on the Senate Floor and began reading a single passage, several other Senators leapt to their feet to interrupt the reading. Susan Schaar, the Senate Clerk, quickly had embarrassed Senate Officials rush the teenage Senate Pages from the Senate Floor in order to protect them from exposure to this moral sewage.
Conservatives and creationists on the Texas State Board of Education have an enormous impact on the content of school textbooks nationwide. Why? Publishers will do what it takes to get on the Texas list.
Not the first time, and it won’t be the last: John Green’s award-winning YA novel Looking for Alaska is under fire in Kentucky.
Perhaps a little off topic (but maybe not considering the long history of attempts to ban or suppress his novel 1984), but the BBC turned down the gift of a statue of George Orwell, who for a brief period was a BBC correspondent, as being “too left-wing a figure for the BBC to honour.”
Speaking of Orwell, here’s a clip of John Cleese speaking on the topic of political correctness gone too far:
[youtube]https://youtu.be/QAK0KXEpF8U[/youtube]