{"id":18278,"date":"2016-04-07T09:23:49","date_gmt":"2016-04-07T16:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=18278"},"modified":"2016-04-07T09:35:40","modified_gmt":"2016-04-07T16:35:40","slug":"you-cant-read-that-68","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=18278","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

\"SHORPY_8c28669a\"<\/a>
Sit-down strikers, Fisher Body plant No. 3, 1937. Photo by Sheldon Dick.<\/center><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1966, the school board in Hanover County, Virginia, voted unanimously to remove all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> from school libraries. Harper Lee herself responded<\/a> with an offer to\u00a0cover the costs of enrolling members of the school board in any first grade reading class of their choice.<\/p>\n

A librarian writes about selecting books<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Pressures from the right and left are different. Libraries don\u2019t usually hear from the right until people want a book removed from the collection. These complaints are usually related to sex, language, and violence. The pressure from the left is often more nuanced, having to do with race, cultures, and gender issues, and tends to influence purchases.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another challenge to Huckleberry Finn<\/em><\/a>, this time in\u00a0Tracy, California.\u00a0The complaining parent wanted the book\u00a0replaced with a bowdlerized version, but the school district superintendent labeled\u00a0controversy over the classic novel a\u00a0“dead issue” and will\u00a0keep the book on school library shelves.<\/p>\n

In Canada, a comedian has been\u00a0forced to appear\u00a0before a government human rights tribunal investigating\u00a0one of his jokes. This bears watching<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Vigilantes at work<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"vigilante<\/p>\n

Good news from Virginia, where the governor this week vetoed HB 516<\/a>, which would have\u00a0forced teachers and school districts to label books as “sexually explicit” over even single passages taken out of context.\u00a0During the debate over the proposed Virginia bill, a school teacher wrote to a state senator to defend the teaching of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved<\/em>. The response from the state senator<\/a> is LOL funny:<\/p>\n

That book is so vile\u2014so profoundly filthy\u2014that when a Senator rose on the Senate Floor and began reading a single passage, several other Senators leapt to their feet to interrupt the reading. Susan Schaar, the Senate Clerk, quickly had embarrassed Senate Officials rush the teenage Senate Pages from the Senate Floor in order to protect them from exposure to this moral sewage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Conservatives and creationists on the Texas State Board of Education<\/a> have an enormous impact on the content of school textbooks nationwide. Why?\u00a0Publishers will do what it takes to get on the Texas list.<\/p>\n

Not\u00a0the first time, and it won’t be the last: John Green’s award-winning YA novel Looking for Alaska<\/em> is under fire in Kentucky<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Perhaps a little off topic\u00a0(but maybe not considering the long history of\u00a0attempts\u00a0to ban or suppress his novel 1984),<\/em>\u00a0but the BBC turned down the gift of a statue of George Orwell<\/a>, who for a brief period was a BBC correspondent, as being “too left-wing a figure for the BBC to honour.”<\/p>\n

Speaking of Orwell, here’s a clip of John Cleese speaking on the topic of political correctness gone too far:<\/p>\n

[youtube]https:\/\/youtu.be\/QAK0KXEpF8U[\/youtube]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You Can\u2019t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. In 1966, the school board in Hanover County, Virginia, voted unanimously to remove all copies of To Kill a Mockingbird from school libraries. Harper Lee herself responded with an offer to\u00a0cover the costs of enrolling members of the school board […]<\/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-18278","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\/18278","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=18278"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18484,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18278\/revisions\/18484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}