You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups.
YCRT! News
A public library in Lexington Park, Maryland, observed Banned Books Week with a display of 34 banned and challenged books, covering each book with brown lunch bags labeled “Do Not Read This. Lift to see the banned book, you rebel, you.” Parents lifted the bags and discovered that 9 of the books addressed sex, including one titled “The Little Black Book for Girlz; a Book on Healthy Sexuality,” and are now accusing the library of “enticing children to cross comfort lines like having sex with each other, same-sex partners, kinky sex and sex with anyone.”
Novelist Joyce Carol Oates recently stepped into the lions’ den with this tweet:
The backlash from offended Mississippians was instant and severe, but I quite take Ms Oate’s point: if parents in Mississippi are upset over eighth-graders being exposed to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” you’d think they’d go through the roof over the far more adult novels of William Faulkner. Conclusion? Either they haven’t read Faulkner, or Mississippi schools don’t teach the novels of their favorite literary son.
Speaking of the challenge against “To Kill a Mockingbird” in Biloxi, Mississippi, I’m happy to report that the school board reversed its decision to pull the book and has decided to keep it in the curriculum. I’m less happy to report they compromised, and that students will now have to have parental permission to read it.
The school board president in Lawrence, Kansas, insists the district is not banning “Huckleberry Finn,” but merely searching for the proper way to present it to students. Uh huh.
Hey, librarians, teachers and timid school board administrators, here’s an idea for you! If it works for Warner Brothers (when was the last time you heard of parental challenges to old Looneytunes cartoons on TV or YouTube?), it should work for “Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
The Washington Examiner, a conservative newspaper, takes Trump to task over the “impotence and ignorance of [his] threats” to impose censorship over liberal media. I guess they realize censorship of the left might eventually result in censorship of the right. If so, bully for them.
University of North Dakota professor quits after being forbidden to conduct seminars on the Dakota Access oil pipeline protest. The professor “did not specify who turned down his requests but said he was told that the university’s ‘senior administration’ feared the state Legislature would retaliate against the campus if lectures on the pipeline protests proceeded.” Hmmm … this threat to free speech seems potent enough. What happens when Trump’s threats to censor liberal media quit being impotent?
Politics Culture War at Play when Banning Books. There, YouGov.com, I fixed your headline for you.
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund joined protests against an Illinois school board’s banning of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” after one parent asked that his child be given an alternate reading assignment, a gross over-reaction that also bypassed the school board’s own challenged book review policy. The book is now back in the curriculum.
Before we celebrate winning one small battle in the unending war against “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” consider a new policy proposal being considered by California’s Conejo Valley school board, prompted by a recent challenge to that book, that will “require district teachers to alert parents before their children are assigned to read books that have been identified by the California Department of Education as having mature content like depictions of rape, violence and suicide.” Now that the policy has been floated, parents are demanding it be applied across the curriculum, to include health, science, history, you name it. Any bets on how conservative activist parents will use such a policy in their battle against the teaching of sex education, evolution, and the history of racism in the United States?
Would it surprise you to learn that Breitbart, the infamous white supremacist media outlet, is opposed to a Mexican American Studies (MAS) textbook being considered by the Texas State Board of Education, which, if adopted, will be used by schools with MAS programs around the country?