{"id":16683,"date":"2015-06-27T12:50:37","date_gmt":"2015-06-27T19:50:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=16683"},"modified":"2015-06-27T12:50:37","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T19:50:37","slug":"you-cant-read-that-60","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=16683","title":{"rendered":"You Can’t Read That!"},"content":{"rendered":"

You Can\u2019t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups.<\/p>\n

\"rainbow<\/a>
A rainbow of books to commemorate\u00a0the historic\u00a0Supreme Court of the United States ruling on same-sex marriage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Well, two steps forward, one step back: in spite of the SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage, books with\u00a0LGBT themes and\u00a0characters\u00a0are still widely challenged. Here’s an interesting article<\/a> about ongoing parental challenges and “vigilante censorship” in Vermont schools.<\/p>\n

It’s not just Vermont, nor is it just high school: an undergraduate in Yucaipa, California has complained to college administrators that four graphic novels taught in an English course are pornographic and violent<\/a>. Two of the four graphic novels, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman<\/em> and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home<\/em>, contain depictions of transexuals and lesbians. I haven’t read the other two, but wouldn’t be surprised if they touched upon non-traditional sexuality as well.<\/p>\n

This month, parents and conservative activists went after the Hays, Kansas public library for setting\u00a0up a display of of\u00a0books<\/a> to commemorate LGBT Pride Month.<\/p>\n

An elementary school teacher and an assistant principal in Chapel Hill, North Carolina have resigned after parental protests<\/a> over the classroom reading of a\u00a0gay fable written for children. The teacher read\u00a0the story\u00a0to his class after some of his third-graders began to bully\u00a0a student they\u00a0perceived to be gay.<\/p>\n

A Los Angeles, California high school teacher has been suspended<\/a> for reading a passage from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/em> to his class. The offending passage\u00a0included this:\u00a0“The duke and the king worked hard all day, setting up a stage and curtain and row of candles for footlights. \u2026 At last, when he\u2019d built up everyone\u2019s expectations high enough, he rolled up the curtain. The next minute the king came prancing out on all fours, naked. He was painted in rings and stripes all over in all sorts of colors and looked as splendid as a rainbow.” I don’t know what’s LGBT about that, unless the objecting parents are keying on the words “naked” and “rainbow.”<\/p>\n

But then there’s this, a giant and wholly unnecessary step backwards: a high school English teacher in South Windsor, Connecticut\u00a0was fired<\/a> after showing his class a video of Alan Ginsberg reading his poem Please Master<\/em>. Before we get all het up, perhaps we should read the poem ourselves<\/a>. I did, and all I can say is\u00a0this: “Teach, what the fuck<\/em>\u00a0were you thinking?”<\/p>\n

\n

Meanwhile, in non-LGBT book banning news:<\/p>\n

A North Carolina challenge<\/a> to the inclusion of The Kite Runner<\/em> on a high school honors English class reading list exposes\u00a0an emerging conservative\u00a0strategy: 1) pass laws requiring teaching abstinence as the primary way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases; 2)\u00a0interpret those laws to mean schools can\u00a0teach abstinence only; 3) challenge books you disapprove of by claiming that since sex in any form other than abstinence can’t be mentioned in class, teachers\u00a0can’t assign books that mention sex. Coming soon to school districts near you, you just watch.<\/p>\n

Yet another elementary school teacher has been fired, not for reading LGBT fables or assigning books that have dirty parts, but for mentioning Sandy Hook<\/a> to students who asked why they had to participate in safety drills. I can extrapolate from this that books with anti-mass shooting and\/or gun control themes will soon be on conservatives’ book banning lists.<\/p>\n

After all this, we need some good news:<\/p>\n

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho parents’ \u00a0challenge to the inclusion of Steinbeck’s 1937 novella\u00a0Of Mice and Men<\/em>\u00a0on a ninth-grade reading list\u00a0has been rejected by the school board.<\/p>\n

An Albany, New York parent protested that the “level of violence and explicitly sexual passages” made Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale<\/em>\u00a0“unacceptable as a high school reading assignment.” Happily, the school review committee disagreed and the highly-regarded novel will remain on the AP\u00a0English class reading list<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You Can\u2019t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. Well, two steps forward, one step back: in spite of the SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage, books with\u00a0LGBT themes and\u00a0characters\u00a0are still widely challenged. Here’s an interesting article about ongoing parental challenges and “vigilante censorship” in Vermont schools. It’s not just […]<\/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":[1900,1902,1901],"class_list":["post-16683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banned-books","tag-lgbt","tag-sandy-hook","tag-sexual-themes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16683","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=16683"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16857,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16683\/revisions\/16857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}