And the award for most Orwellian organization name October 7, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in Religion, language and lit, wingnuts.trackback
Goes to the “Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools,” who, in the tradition of the PATRIOT Act, the Healthy Forests Initiative, and the Discovery Institute, are busy trying to ban books like Beloved, Ceremony, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Slaughterhouse Five, and The Things They Carried.
Meanwhile, the Citizens have kindly presented us with a list labeled “books your children will not be reading in school.” It’s their tacitly approved list. So what kind of books to the Moralists love? Well, that list includes Christopher Columbus, Mariner; Gone with the Wind; Of Plymouth Plantation; Pilgrim’s Progress; and The Screwtape Letters.
Almost all of the “approved” books are by white authors, and most of them by men. Meanwhile, a much higher percentage of the books they object to are by women and people of color. As Pat Hayes notes, “More black authors are now being read in high school and college literature courses and that, apparently, troubles the mothers for morality who want these books off the shelves. An inordinately high percentage of the books they oppose are by black or Hispanic authors.”
I can’t help but note the overtly Christian leaning in the literature “recommended” by the Citizens-Against-Education, as well. This should come as no surprise. These people don’t really think that the use of the “F-word” in Ceremony will corrupt our children, they object to the idea that they don’t get to tell everyone what to think.
This is much more a scandal than Foley. This is like 1930’s Germany. Why isn’t this being reported more widely in the media? Thanks, I will send it to some friends.
Gee, what do Christopher Columbus, Gone With the Wind, Pilgrim’s Progress and the Screwtape Letters have in common? Give up?
A complete refusal to acknowledge any minority groups, the rosy portrayal of slavery (and in Screwtape and Pilgrim’s, the portrayal of slavery as being earned by moral rectitude), the creeping mixture of paranoia (Screwtape, Pilgrim’s) and rose-colored crap (Columbus, Gone.)
I spend all damn weekend deprogramming my kids because of shit like this.
Yes, Virginia. Other people do exist.
You’re not kidding about ‘most Orwellian name’. Which makes me wonder.. is 1984 on the approved list? ;)
[...] If you haven’t yet noticed, the banning and challenging of books is a major interest of mine. So when Evil Bender wrote a post about a group called Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools, I naturally had to check out their website. And then I naturally spent much of Saturday reading their reviews of a number of books, their reasons for objecting to those books, and their suggestions for replacements. And so now I naturally would like to respond to their statements and ideas. In the interest of keeping my posts to a manageable length, I’ll be parcelling my thoughts out over a handful of posts, which will probably be spread out over a couple of days. I’ll begin with some somewhat general thoughts. [...]