Ignorance Week
by KTKSeptember 27th, 2006
Is it just me, or does Banned Books Week seem to come like three times a year? I guess the holiday really is annual; it’s the stupidity that’s chronic. Anyway, go ahead, click the link, and chuckle at the chuckleheads who tried to ban It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health and It’s So Amazing! A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families - in both cases for “sex education” and “sexual content”. (Yes, they protested sex education in sex education books. I wonder if there’s some clown out there somewhere who protests the Kelly Blue Book for “automobile content”?) While you’re at it, follow some of the helpful tips to show support for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of conscience.
Redneck Mother got it just right:
I always enjoy Banned Books Week. The lists of most-banned books are a guide to what the kids and I should be reading, because I don’t like censorship and because anything that scares the timid must be worth reading. . . .
Hat tip: Jill at Feministe
Categories: Books, Church & State, Culture, General, Legal Issues, Media, News & Current Events, Politics, Religion, Writing |
Agreed. “Redneck Mother” did seem to get it right. Censorship and democracy are incompatible. I, too, am curious, when a book or article is censored by libraries or certain publishers. Writers in this country are increasingly under attack by certain folks who have their own ideas of what is politically or socially correct. That is why the “underground press” is living increasingly on the internet. If the corporations get total control of the internet, only approved material which helps their bottom line will most likely be published.
Actually, in Canada we have Freedom to Read Week in February and many libraries will also recognize Banned Book Week in September, so you aren’t too far off the mark.
We always set up a display of books that have been challenged and they fly off the shelf.