I’ve mentioned prison book restrictions and bannings in previous roundups. The last such item I covered was a South Carolina jail’s policy of banning all books other than the Bible. The ACLU is now challenging that policy on behalf of an inmate. Reading is a civil liberty? Damn right it is!
Here’s a related article about prison officials considering reading restrictions for inmates in Connecticut.
“This book been on the shelves for 10 years, at five different elementary schools,” Gibbon said. “That’s 2,500 students a year. That’s a lot of kids that had opportunity and a lot of parents to give their input on it. This is the first time there’s been any question about it.” Seattle area mom complains about elementary school library book; school stands by its guns.
Closer to home (my home, anyway): Phoenix mom complains about elementary school library book; school immediately caves.
New York school district stands up to parents challenging The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
Interesting. A theater troupe was going to perform To Kill a Mockingbird at an Ohio school. The school wanted the script changed to eliminate the word “nigger,” but the publishing company wouldn’t allow alterations to the script. So the school canceled the performance.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that challenging school reading list and library books has become an organized activity, fanned by religious and political groups. Know thine enemy (warning: not for the faint of heart).
Actually, my daughter-in-law (okay, technically ex-step-daughter-in-law, for what it’s worth), was involved in a local theater production of “South Pacific.” To be politically correct, the director and the theater company removed all denigrating ethnic terms, thereby completely defeating the point and leaving the audience (most of whom were to young to have seen the original) wondering what the hell it was all about. It’s hard to make a point about racism without illustrating what racism is, what it looks like, what it sounds like, how it feels. In our house, growing up, words like “Jap” and “Chink” were hitting words. I never even heard the word “kike” until I was 23. But, then again, that was Marin County, where they are very, very polite about their inherent racism. Now, let’s all sing the U.S. Census’s finding about Marin: “Seven of the ten whitest cities in the nation.”
Originally, “political correctness” was reallly just a eupheism for good manners. Unfortunately, it’s been turned into a cult where witless conformists whorship, well, conformity. Now can we just go back to good manners?
Did you know that, during World War II, when P. G. Wodehouse was interned by the Germans (he and his wife were staying on the coast of France at the time) the Germans forced him to make a series of broadcasts and the Brits, in total hysteria, not only banned the broadcasts but also a large number of libraries tossed all the books he’d written? As it turned out, Wodehouse and the other Brits and French he was imprisoned with had made an agreement among themselves to “keep a stiff upper lip” and not let the Nazi’s get them down. The broadcasts themselves (of which I believe there were only three) are very funny. My favorite line is when his wife says, “Don’t look now, but there’s the German army behind you.” I don’t know what the Nazi’s thought they’d get when they put a writer of comedy in jail. Sort of like putting Dave Barry into Gitmo. The mind boggles at the possibilities.