Banned books yay!
Sep. 21st, 2005 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tikistitch
Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter
In May 2005, the Oklahoma House of Representatives passed a resolution calling on public libraries to remove children's books with references to gay characters or gay families.... In response, gay and lesbian civil rights groups in Oklahoma donated copies of Lost Prophet: The Life of Bayard Rustin and Stonewall: The Riot that Sparked the Gay Revolution to local high schools. The donation was met with conservative outcry; however, the Oklahoma City school board voted to permit the donation.
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
Parents of the Blue Valley School District in Kansas are currently petitioning for this and thirteen other books to be removed from all high school classrooms in the district due to "vulgar language, sexual explicitness, or violent imagery that is gratuitously employed."
America (The Book) by Jon Stewart
Two libraries in southern Mississippi banned inclusion of the book in their collections due to nude photographs of the nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Wal-Mart, Inc. cited the same image in their decision not to stock the book.
There's tons more!
http://www.abffe.org/bbw-booklist-detailed.htm
Go buy 'em at Powells.com:
http://www.powells.com/psection/BannedBooks.html
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Date: 2005-09-21 11:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-21 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-21 12:10 pm (UTC)I was pretty familiar with the "ever-banned" books, like Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, and just about anything by Judy Blume. I thought it was kinda funny that they're now trying to ban stuff like The Hot Zone (a science book!!), America: the Book, and anything that ever even tangentially mentions gayness. My hope is that authors can start churning 'em out faster than our mentally-challenged friends can ban them.
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Date: 2005-09-21 12:42 pm (UTC)I always do a banned books week post...almost forgot it's coming up, thanks for the reminder :D
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Date: 2005-09-21 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-21 12:46 pm (UTC)I'm typing fast while cataloging, that's my sorry excuse...
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Date: 2005-09-21 12:26 pm (UTC)"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education."
-- Alfred Whitney Griswold, Essays on Education
The political neanderthals can do their best to try and stamp out ideas they don't like, but sooner or later they'll get idealogical spikes through their feet. An infection will set in, fester, and one by one they'll die because they lack the knowledge to save themselves.
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Date: 2005-09-21 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-21 12:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-21 02:00 pm (UTC)OTOH (and I speak with love as a native Santa Monican) we have to answer for people who arrange chakras for a living.
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Date: 2005-09-21 01:24 pm (UTC)No less than four Francesca Lia Block books?! I think she's got the record on this list. Go Francesca!
And my beloved Catcher in the Rye. Offending parents for over 50 years! Gotta love the classics...
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Date: 2005-09-21 01:59 pm (UTC)The perseveration is indeed remarkable. I mean, haven't people figured out by now that Huckleberry Finn isn't going away?