<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/02/tn-govt-saves-school-children-from-smut-like-magic-tree-house-calvin-hobbes-a-light-in-the-attic/>
"Book bans are all the rage these days, as you likely well know. Far too many
people, and folks in government more importantly, seem to have read Ray
Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451 not as a lesson in the dangers of new media, but as
some sort of instruction manual for how to treat literature. But the real story
here is that a bunch of cowardly state and federal politicians are placating
the desires largely of the religious right, who are seeking to tightly control
the books that children have access to in public, secular schools. And if you
can’t manage to understand how plainly that is the antithesis of our form of
government, then you’re beyond help.
But because authoritarianism makes a fool of itself as a habit, and
religiously-based authoritarianism all the moreso, then end result of these
attempts at censorship always eventually reveal themselves as absurd. And if
you need an example of that, you need only look at the state of Tennessee.
Magic Tree House author Mary Pope Osborne, children’s poet Shel
Silverstein and Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson have joined
Judy Blume, Sarah J. Maas, Eric Carle and Kurt Vonnegut on a mind-boggling
list of hundreds of books purged from some Tennessee school libraries.
The removals are the result of a growing political movement to control
information through book banning. In 2024, the state legislature amended the
“Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022” to specify that any materials that
“in whole or in part” contain any “nudity, or descriptions or depictions of
sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence, or sadomasochistic
abuse” are inappropriate for all students and do not belong in a school
library. This change means books are not evaluated as a whole, and excerpts
can be considered without context, if they have any content that is deemed
to cross these lines. This leaves no room for educators and librarians to
curate collections that reflect the real world and serve the educational
needs of today’s students."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
