The anti-gay, right-wing gropu Called2Action has put out enough pressure on Wake County school officials to ban books in the schools. Earlier, I posted on how Called2Action, which is based in Raleigh, is exerting pressure on North Carolina legislators.
According to an article from the Guardian (UK), a dictionary of slang words, as well as five other books have been formally challenged in Wake County, at the bequest of Called2Action.
The author of what has been described as the definitive dictionary of slang is gobsmacked, gutted, throwing up bunches, honked, hipped, and jacked like a cock-maggot in a sink-hole. A North Carolina school district has banned the dictionary under pressure from one of a growing number of conservative Christian groups using the internet to encourage school book bans across the US.
Jonathon Green, who compiled the 87,000 entries in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, which was published last year, said that North Carolina is the only place he knows of where the book cannot be used in schools.
A Wake County school official told ABC News that five books, including the dictionary, were formally challenged. The others were listed as The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier, Junie B Jones and Some Sneaky, Peaky Spying by Barbara Park, Reluctantly Alice by Phyllis Reynolds and In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. School officials acted after pressure from Called2Action, a local Christian activist group.
Some parents were also reportedly upset that their children were required to read books such as The Colour Purple by Alice Walker and Beloved by Toni Morrison, on the grounds that the books contain “vulgar and sexually explicit language”.
See… a large part of how the right-wing, anti-gay, fundie groups of America plan on keeping gay people at the bottom is by limiting what everyone else can see, hear, or know about gay people. After all, if a person’s only source of information about gay people comes from anti-gay groups, well… then more people will think like them. It is a good strategy, I’ll hand them that, but it won’t work. There are too many people who are too smart for that B.S.
Hat Tip: Pam’s House Blend
June 26th, 2006 at 10:59 am
Interestingly, my honors English 11 class in high school could not read the Color Purple because a boy in the previous semester was not allowed to read the book by his mother, because of the sexual imagery. The teacher was so frustrated with the situation that she stopped teaching the book altogether. This isn’t just a problem that is happening in Wake County. It is unfortunate that parents send their children to school to get an education, and then inhibit taht education. If they feel so strongly about what they want their children to hear and not hear, they should home school their child or send them to a different school, don’t punish the hundreds of other children at school with your child who want an education! It’s sad when freedoms are taken away from schools. Ironically, I am sure that these are the same parents who are upset that the ten commandments were taken out of school, and now they are doing the same thing. Shame shame shame.