School library book bans in a nutshell

 

Oh, Tennessee

 

Need some good news?

 

It's Sunday

 

But not books...

Testing the limits in Arkansas

[O]n Christmas Eve, a federal judge struck down a law that put booksellers and librarians at risk of imprisonment if they provided minors with “harmful” material. That includes themes about race and being LGBTQ. The Judge wrote that the law tried to deputize “librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship” and that if their decision were made in the shadow of “fear of jail time, it is likely they will shelve only books fit for young children and segregate or discard the rest.”

Holly Dickson, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, called the law “an attempt to ‘thought police,’” and said the Judge’s decision was a “victory over totalitarianism” and “a testament to the courage of librarians, booksellers and readers who refused to bow to intimidation.” Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “Schools and libraries shouldn’t put obscene material in front of our kids.”

It’s likely we will see an appeal to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals from the state as early as this week.

  Joyce Vance

Making America Great Again

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Nice

Been seeing several Instagram and TikTok posts of people showing up to local hearings to show up the absurdity of the "conservative" proposals.  Here's one on school book banning:

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 09/29/2024: Mocking MAGA in Springfield, Ohio...

Please stop electing Republicans

She also signed a law weakening child labor laws.  Those kids probably don't have time to read.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Rare story of facts overshadowing feelings

Weeks after winning a school board seat in her deeply red Texas county, Courtney Gore immersed herself in the district’s curriculum, spending her nights and weekends poring over hundreds of pages of lesson plans [...] searching for evidence of the sweeping national movement she had warned on the campaign trail was indoctrinating schoolchildren.

[...]

Gore, the co-host of a far-right online talk show, had promised that she would be a strong Republican voice on the nonpartisan school board. Citing “small town, conservative Christian values,” she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth.

[...]

But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.

The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”

Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.”

  Texas Tribune

I hope she wasn't surprised.

So, in the spring of 2022, Gore went public with a series of Facebook posts.

[...]

“I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy bs,” Gore wrote. “I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer. It’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”

[...]

Gore said she feels that she was unwittingly part of a statewide effort to weaken local support of public schools and lay the groundwork for a voucher system.

[...]

[S]he wrote in a June 8 Facebook post. “I refuse to be told what to do, what to say or how to vote. I refuse to participate in any agenda that will dismantle or abolish public education.”

[...]

Gore and other disillusioned local Republicans have formed a group pushing against an “ultra-right” faction of the party that it says has become obsessed with “administering purity tests” and stoking divisive politics.

She won't be on the board long.

Gore is facing backlash from the same people who supported her race. She has been threatened at raucous school board meetings and shunned by people she once considered friends.

School marshals escort her and her fellow board members to their cars to ensure no one accosts them.

When things get particularly heated, a fellow trustee follows her in his car to make sure she gets home safely.

Jesus wept.

But maybe there really is some hope.

[T]he November election delivered a setback to those [hardliners] who wanted to take over the school board. The two candidates supported by hard-line conservatives lost by wide margins, denying the county’s far-right faction the majority on the board. Among the winners in that election was Nancy Alana, the school board member whom Gore ousted two years earlier. This time around Gore endorsed Alana, and the two former opponents have since become friends and allies.

“She let everybody know that she had been misled and that she has seen for herself the good things that are happening in our school district,” Alana said. “That the school board can be trusted. That the administrators can be trusted. And she has spoken out on that. And that has made a big difference. And she is very well thought of in our community because of her willingness to step up and say, ‘I was wrong.’”

This is a long story about the insane lengths far-right activism has gone in the Texas school system. Continue reading here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

January 1, 2024

MAGA!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Kudos, Illinois

It's Sunday

Touché.

Frustrated with book challenges and bans in their school district, a parent in Utah decided to submit a complaint of their own — about the Bible.

The Davis School District took the parent's objection seriously, placing the Bible under review. This week, the district officially decided to remove the religious text from elementary and middle school libraries for containing "vulgarity or violence." The ban will take effect immediately, with Bibles being removed from classrooms even as they close down for the summer.

[...]

The committee assigned to review the Bible for the Davis School District determined that it does not meet the requirements to violate the state's law, but that it should still be limited to high school-aged students. The decision is already being appealed by another parent, and that appeal will be decided at a public meeting in the future.

  NPR

Appealed to be banned in high-school too, or appealed to be put back in elementary schools?

Ken Ivory, a Republican legislator in the state, released a statement on Thursday reversing his position on the ban, after initially calling the complaint a "mockery." He wrote that the Bible is a "challenging read" for children, and that the Bible is "best taught, and best understood, in the home, and around the hearth, as a family."

As if more than a handful of families even crack open a Bible at home. But, good on Ken.

In the day since this decision was announced, the Davis School District has also received a request for the Book of Mormon to be reviewed for inappropriate content.

That should be interesting. It's Utah.

Meanwhile in Florida

Amanda Gorman, the American poet who shot to international stardom when she recited The Hill We Climb at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, has vowed to defeat book bans in Florida after the poem was removed for reading by elementary school children in an educational institution in Miami-Dade county.

Gorman, 25, said she was “gutted” to learn that a complaint from a single parent led to her inaugural poem being banned from Bob Graham education center in Miami Lakes.

The poem was one of five books challenged by a parent of children at the school, including The ABCs of Black History and books on Cuba.

In the complaint, the parent mistakenly listed Oprah Winfrey as the author of The Hill We Climb, and said she objected to the poem because it was “not educational and have indirectly hate messages”.

Gorman hit back in a lengthy social media post.

“So they ban my book from young readers, confuse me with Oprah, fail to specify what parts of my poetry they object to, refuse to read any reviews, and offer no alternatives … Unnecessary book bans like these are on the rise, and we must fight back,” she said.

  Guardian

Yes, we must.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 05/25/2023:

China takes a page from US red states' agenda

Books about the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hong Kong protest movements, and other subjects deemed politically sensitive by Beijing have been removed from the former British colony’s public libraries in the lead-up to the 34th anniversary of the killings.

Hong Kong media have reported a marked increase in the number of book and documentary removals, which have been growing since the authoritarian clampdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and the introduction of the national security law in 2020. It has resulted in a significant curtailing of political freedoms in the city and multiple arrests.

[...]

Ming Pao reported that about 40% of politically themed books, magazines and videos available at the end of 2020 were gone, 96 of them removed this year.

  Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Some sanity in Illinois

Brave new world

Much needed good news out of Texas

A federal judge in Texas ruled that at least 12 books removed from public libraries by Llano County officials, many because of their LGBTQ and racial content, must be placed back onto shelves within 24 hours, according to an order filed Thursday.

Seven residents sued county officials in April 2022, claiming their First and 14th Amendment rights were violated when books deemed inappropriate by some people in the community and Republican lawmakers were removed from public libraries or access was restricted.

  CNN

Good for them. I keep wondering why only certain people's (often certain parents') rights matter.

Books ordered to return to shelves include “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson, “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and “Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen” by Jazz Jennings.

The library system also is required to reflect these books as available in their catalog and cannot remove any books for any reason while the case is ongoing, US District Judge Robert Pitman said in his order.

“Although libraries are afforded great discretion for their selection and acquisition decisions, the First Amendment prohibits the removal of books from libraries based on either viewpoint or content discrimination,” Pitman said.

The fight to protect access to books comes amid a book banning boom, with an alarming increase in attempts to censor books in K-12 schools, universities and public libraries. Many of these efforts seek to pull books with LGBTQ characters or themes and are part of a broader, conservative-led movement to chisel away at the rights and status of LGBTQ Americans.

Many of the book bans have also been aimed at authors of color exploring history, racism or their own experiences in America.

[...]

In 2022, the number of attempts to censor library books reached an unparalleled record high since the American Library Association (ALA) began documenting data about book censorship over 20 years ago, ALA said in a March press release.

ALA cataloged 1,269 attempts in 2022; nearly double the number of challenges in 2021.

Fascism on the rise in America.

It's Sunday

Frustrated by the books being removed from school libraries, a Utah parent says there’s one that hasn’t been challenged yet, but that they believe should be, for being “one of the most sex-ridden books around.”

So they’ve submitted a request for their school district in Davis County to now review the Bible for any inappropriate content.

“Incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide,” the parent wrote in their request, listing topics they found concerning in the religious text. “You’ll no doubt find that the Bible, under Utah Code Ann. § 76-10-1227, has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition.”

  Salt Lake Tribune

Well, it's about time. (Of course, what teen is checking out the Bible from the school library?)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Bless librarians