Happy Banned Books Week

An actual Harry Potter book burning.
A reprise from Dirty John Bonny.

One thing that the fundie Christians, the advocates of abstinence-only sex education, the creationists, and other loonies have in common is the magical thinking that if you can suppress the reporting of a fact or idea then the reality will somehow go away.

The most-challenged book of 2006, according to the American Library Asossciation, was And Tango Makes Three.

There's another theme running here, that book-banners don't actually read what they're railing against. This title alone is enough to get knickers in a twist: If there are now three, then before there were two, and that can't be allowed.

The story seemed like a surefire hit for children. A pair of penguins take care of an egg that isn’t theirs and then raise the baby penguin, after it hatches, as their own.How heartwarming. And who doesn’t love penguins?

Plenty of parents, it turns out, when both penguin parents are male.


From the Chicaro Tribune via CommonDreams.

I've covered a lot of this crap here at Dirty John Bonny, and it's hard to pick out the best links.

There's that crazy woman in Gwinnett County, Georgia, trying to ban Harry Potter, and the teenage boys who were "disturbed" after discovering a lesbian sex book in their local library, and scrotums, and the unbelievably tone-deaf idiot trying to ban Fahrenheit 451.

Slipping off Top-of-the-pops banned book list was The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

Taking up the banner are Toni Morrison and others. May ye all continue to offend.

So thank you, librarians. It's sort of unfortunate that this is your biggest week.

Banned Books, at the American Library Association.

Last year's post is here.