{"id":17742,"date":"2015-12-11T14:52:04","date_gmt":"2015-12-11T21:52:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17742"},"modified":"2015-12-11T14:52:04","modified_gmt":"2015-12-11T21:52:04","slug":"you-cant-read-that-65","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17742","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

\"hugo_meh_oscar_reaction\"<\/a>
(Image from The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore<\/em>)<\/center><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When this high school principal<\/a> says \u201cParents should have the right to determine what their students are exposed to in the classrooms,\u201d what she really means is that parents of a few students get to set school policy on what any<\/em> student is exposed to. Pulled from classrooms:\u00a0Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

High school book-banning\u00a0campaigns in New Jersey<\/a>\u00a0have targeted\u00a0Ariel Dorfman\u2019s play Death and the Maiden,<\/em> Bernard MacLaverty\u2019s novel Cal,<\/em> John Green’s young adult novel Looking for Alaska<\/em>, and, just for good measure, \u201cany other material that is not age appropriate.” Some good news<\/a>: a review committee has ruled that Death and the Maiden<\/em> and Cal<\/em> will stay on the reading list at\u00a0Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School.<\/p>\n

A proposed Louisiana law<\/a> would force online booksellers to verify users’ ages before showing them titles of books in their catalogs deemed “harmful to minors.” Uh, who exactly does the deeming?<\/p>\n

Portage, Indiana, high school administrators are bravely allowing drama students to put on a production of The Bad Seed<\/em> … so long as they rewrite the script to to remove references to drugs, alcohol, and sex<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Closely related to the Indiana incident is the growing\u00a0trend of schools\u00a0redacting books<\/a>\u00a0to head off\u00a0the possibility of parental challenges. When the parent of a student at Nashville Prep, Tennessee, challenged the assignment of David Benioff\u2019s City of Thieves<\/em>, the school responded with this statement: “Every scholar has received a redacted version of the book. … We changed scenes involving \u2018sex\u2019 to scenes involving \u2018kissing.\u2019 We changed curse words like \u2018s**t\u2019 to \u2018poop.\u2019 We also redacted whole sections that involved mature scenes.”<\/p>\n

Have you ever had a post removed from Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? OnlineCensorship.org<\/a> wants to hear from you.<\/p>\n

Mount Horeb Area School District, Wisconsin, canceled a reading<\/a> of children\u2019s book I Am Jazz<\/em> after a conservative Christian organization threatened to sue. The issue? I Am Jazz<\/em> is about a transgender child. Here<\/a>, the author responds.<\/p>\n

Parents of a sixth-grader in Rosemount, Minnesota, are demanding the removal of Just One Day<\/em><\/a> by Gayle Forman from all school district libraries, citing \u201ca graphic sex scene, underage drinking [and] date rape.\u201d Because it’s easier to purge school\u00a0libraries of anything potentially offensive than to monitor what\u00a0your kids bring home to read, apparently.<\/p>\n

Residents of Wasilla, Alaska, demanded the removal of an\u00a0LGBT-friendly book<\/a>\u00a0from the juvenile nonfiction shelves of the\u00a0public library. End-running the library’s review process, city residents stormed a city council meeting, accusing the librarian\u00a0of being a pedophile and\u00a0demanding\u00a0the book be banned outright, saying they don’t want “gay books” or books about gay people in the library at all. The librarian wound up moving\u00a0the book, along with 300 others, to the adult shelves of the library, but the landscape is littered with\u00a0bad feelings<\/a>\u00a0and many issues remain unresolved.<\/p>\n

Factual errors in school textbooks? So what<\/a>?<\/p>\n

\u201cI just have concerns that it\u2019s too graphic, even though these are Muppets characters,\u201d Carney said. \u201cUnfortunately in this world there is a lot of war and strife and poverty; I understand that. I just don\u2019t know how appropriate that is to be teaching that to 5-year-olds.\u201d School board member wants a Muppets book removed from\u00a0the\u00a0kindergarten curriculum<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Are you ready for the Monty Pythonesque recitation of social justice buzzwords\u00a0and call for limits on free speech<\/a>\u00a0issued by students at New York’s Hamilton College? Here’s a sample to whet your appetite (or send you running\u00a0to Fox News for an anti-PC innoculation,\u00a0depending): “We, the Students of Hamilton College, demand the end of the inevitable tokenization of all marginalized bodies at Hamilton College.”\u00a0Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I’m being repressed!<\/p>\n

To end on a lighter note, here are some banned book tattoos. More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n

\"Lord-of-the-Flies-Tattoo\"<\/a>
Lord of the Flies<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/td>\n
\n

\"To-Kill-A-Mockingbird-Tattoo\"<\/a>
To Kill a Mockingbird<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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You Can\u2019t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. When this high school principal says \u201cParents should have the right to determine what their students are exposed to in the classrooms,\u201d what she really means is that parents of a few students get to set school policy on what […]<\/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":[1964,48,1083],"class_list":["post-17742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banned-books","tag-banned-books","tag-censorship","tag-challenged-books"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17742","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=17742"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17927,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17742\/revisions\/17927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}