Monday, November 28, 2005

BOOK BURNERS BUSY IN KANSAS

Damn those obscenities! Damn that vulgar language! Damn the sex stuff! In one Kansas school district, 14 books are endangered because some parents say they're filthy. Agape Press has this blurb:
The effort is being led by parents with the group Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools, which believes students in Blue Valley schools are being required to read some novels that are pornographic in nature. However, the Blue Valley Board of Education is refusing to remove the controversial books from the district's high school curriculum.

Greg Motley, a spokesman for the parents group, says the board has a troubling moral worldview -- "and they're extremely sure that our worldview is not correct," he adds.

Still, he encourages parents to take action on behalf of their children. "I think what it's going to take for [the board] to get the message that they need to listen to parents, is for more parents [to make] a stand," says Motley. "It's going to take more parents opting their kids out of the classes that are requiring these books to be read."

But according to the group spokesman, money may be the reason that some parents are hesitating to do anything. He says the economic climate in the community is such that some business-owning parents are taking a financial hit for publicly taking a stand against the books.

"It's a very difficult line to draw in the sand to say I'm going to make my kid walk out of this classroom," he says, "[because] I'm going to cause my kid to be ostracized by the group of peers that he values -- and secondly, that my business might suffer because of the adverse publicity that I receive."

Steve Abrams, chairman of the Kansas State Board of Education, recently stated that "superintendents and local boards of education in some districts continue to promulgate pornography as 'literature,' even though many parents have petitioned the local boards to remove the porn." Motley says his group currently has 800 people on a petition saying the 14 books should be not read by any students in the Blue Valley School District.
What's porn in the eyes of the book burners? Here's the list:
1. All the Pretty Horses
2. Animal Dreams
3. The Awakening
4. The Bean Trees
5. Beloved
6. Black Boy
7. Fallen Angels
8. The Hot Zone
9. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
10. Lords of Discipline
11. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
12. Song of Solomon
13. Stotan
14. This Boy’s Life
Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools has an interesting web site. The group is offended on this page about descriptions of oral sex -- but nary a concern about the word "nigger" in Toni Morrison's "Beloved." Guess the book burners don't mind the N-word, so long as nobody's getting or giving head.

They're really hung up on bestiality, too. One wonders how many sheep they've scared.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

On a similar but even more ridiculous note, it seems Mr. Vincent David Jericho of KSGF -- or V.D., as I like to call him -- was all up in arms this morning about "women's porn," otherwise known as your garden variety trashy romance novel. The horror! Burn it, burn it!

I seem to remember when V.D. first infected the Ozarks last summer that he said he was going to change this market and its reputation for, as he called it, "Bubba radio." Sure does sounds like the same ol' Bubba to me, Pa.