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<\/p>\nYou Can\u2019t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups.<\/p>\n
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YCRT! News:<\/strong><\/p>\n Arizona School Book Banning Update:<\/p>\n Tucson Unified School District’s banned Mexican-American Studies Program<\/a> goes extracurricular. Interested students can now discuss outlawed subject matter and read forbidden books in off-campus classes<\/a>\u00a0while\u00a0earning college credit, thanks to exiled teachers and public support! People will find a way, it seems.<\/p>\n Elsewhere:<\/p>\n The scary part of this thoughtful essay on self-censorship: that if libraries lose public funding and become commercially sponsored, they’ll succumb to pressure to remove or censor controversial books<\/a>.\u00a0You can see the self-censorship dynamic in action at PBS, which is now more dependent on commercial sponsorship than it is on public funding. Here’s a two-part article about PBS censoring content:<\/p>\n Nice one. Click to see the whole cartoon<\/a>.<\/p>\n Interesting look at the other side: the Illinois Family Institute’s reaction<\/a> to the reinstatement of the briefly-banned book The Perks of Being a Wallflower<\/em> in a Chicago area middle school.<\/p>\n The current scandal over NSA domestic surveillance<\/a>\u00a0may have little relationship to book banning or censorship, but it has a lot to do with librarians and the American Library Association, who were the first to challenge the government’s post-9\/11 attempt to snoop into our reading habits<\/a>.<\/p>\n In honor of librarians and the ALA, then, a great quotation from Kurt Vonnegut<\/a>:<\/p>\n And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.<\/p>\n So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course, not everyone likes librarians or the ALA. I mentioned Dan Kleinman and his SafeLibraries organization<\/a> in a previous post<\/a>. Lately he’s been using Twitter to push the notion that people looking at porn on library computers is a widespread phenomenon, somehow linked to commie librarians and the ALA. Here are three Dan Kleinman porn-scare tweets, all posted on the same day:<\/p>\n And here’s another one, explicitly making the librarian\/ALA link:<\/p>\n Notice the lack of links or photos of library users looking at porn? It’s not that I don’t believe Mr. Kleinman, but I’d like to see some proof. So I challenged him last night:<\/p>\n He retweeted my challenge to his own followers, so we’ll see what happens. Next time I’m at my library I’ll check out the computer room. If I see anyone looking at porn, I’ll take photos and put them on Twitter, Facebook, and my own YCRT! posts. I actually agree with Mr. Kleinman on this one: people should not be allowed to use library computers to look at porn … not because I think porn should be outlawed, but because I don’t think it’s right to force it on others in a public place like the library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You Can\u2019t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. YCRT! News: Arizona School Book Banning Update: Tucson Unified School District’s banned Mexican-American Studies Program goes extracurricular. Interested students can now discuss outlawed subject matter and read forbidden books in off-campus classes\u00a0while\u00a0earning college credit, thanks to exiled teachers and public […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[717,1278,1282,1280,1279,1281,1283,1052],"class_list":["post-13009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banned-books","tag-ala","tag-arizona-book-banning","tag-flowers-for-algernon","tag-librarians","tag-pbs-self-censorship","tag-porn-in-libraries","tag-the-chocolate-wars","tag-the-giver"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13009"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31911,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13009\/revisions\/31911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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