Banning Books

I'm always amazed at what people get "offended" by, but I'm someone that didn't get the big deal about the infamous Pie-Fight Ad.

At the beginning of this month, the NY Times had a story about a Muhlenberg, Pennsylvania school board debating the banning of "certain" books from the ciriculum...

..."How would you like if your son and daughter had to read this?" Miss Hunsicker asked.

Then she began to recite from "The Buffalo Tree", a novel set in a juvenile detention center and narrated by a tough, 12-year-old boy incarcerated there. What she read was a scene set in a communal shower, where another adolescent boy is sexually aroused.

"I am in the 11th grade," Miss Hunsicker said. "I had to read this junk."

Less than an hour later, by a unanimous vote of the board (two of its nine members were absent) "The Buffalo Tree" was banned, officially excised from the Muhlenberg High School curriculum. By 8:30 the next morning all classroom copies of the book had been collected and stored in a vault in the principal's office...

So why is this happening?

Judith Krug, director of the library association's office for intellectual freedom, attributed the most recent spike to the empowerment of conservatives in general and to the re-election of President Bush in particular. The same thing happened 25 years ago, she said. "In 1980, we were dealing with an average of 300 or so challenges a year, and then Reagan was elected," she said. "And challenges went to 900 or 1,000 a year."

On the American Library Association's website, they keep a list of the Most Frequently Challenged Books, from 1990-2000, in Libraries & schools. While there are some with obvious controversial material (The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell), there are a lot of literary classics on the list...

Top 10 Challenged Books Between 1990-2000

1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
   
2. Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
   
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
   
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
   
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
   
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
   
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
   
8. Forever by Judy Blume
   
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
   
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Other notable books on the Top 100 list:

13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
    
16. Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
    
17. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
    
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
    
22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
    
37. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
    
41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
    
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
    
43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
    
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
    
52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
    
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
    
70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
    
71. Native Son by Richard Wright
    
88. Where's Waldo? by Martin Hanford
    

If this is done for the children, what are they protecting them from? Life? I've always saw this type of crap as the ultimate delegation of parental responsibility. These parents that object to these books, want the rest of us to raise their kids for them. Instead of parents watching what their kids read & watch, they want to take it away from everyone.

This is also about dictating ideology to the rest of us, and supressing any ideas or thoughts that don't conform to their beliefs...