The evangelical zeolites want to control what your children read. They want you to conform to their religious beliefs.
Conservatives are removing 'pornographic' books from schools. Many feature LGBTQ+ characters.
USA Today via Yahoo News
April 16, 2022
Last November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter to the state’s school board association asking it to remove from districts any materials deemed “pornographic” or “obscene.”Both descriptors have come up frequently amid an extraordinary uptick in efforts to remove certain books from libraries and classrooms – not only in the Lone Star State but across the United States.
[…]
This commonality is evocative of age-old tendencies to conflate sexual or gender nonconformity with sexual obscenity, said Jonathan Friedman of PEN America, a literary and free-speech organization.
That the country is undergoing an unprecedented wave of book-banning is well-documented. The American Library Association counted more than 700 book challenges last year – the most since the organization began tracking such efforts two decades ago.
Do not think that this is just a Republican state issue, it is the whole of the U.S.
CT libraries see more book removal requests, but few get pulled from shelves
The Hour
By Abigail Brone
July 25, 2021
Requests from Connecticut residents to remove books from their public libraries are low, but on the rise, according to library officials.With Norwalk Public Library recently considering a request from a resident to remove a book depicting one of the Sikh religion’s leaders in illustration, the case is an outlier, Connecticut Library Consortium Executive Director Jennifer Keohane said.
“It’s not uncommon, it varies depending on what’s going on in that community,” Keohane said. “Libraries are continually being challenged to uphold our core values of maintaining materials that reflect all points of view and values. The intention is always to have a very rigorous review policy that is open and fair and documented.”
So far it hasn’t come up in the gubernatorial election, my guess is that they want to hide their position on book banning because most of Connecticut voters would be against banning books.
The far right is starting to use gorilla tactics, checking out books and not returning them or maxing out copies of e-book borrowed.
Permanent book borrowing plot backfires
Patron checks out ‘inappropriate’ books, refuses to return them
Boston 25 News
By Jim Morelli
March 22, 2022
Call it the library’s “Universal Understanding”: what you borrow, you return.But that is a concept apparently lost on an unidentified patron of the Millbury Public Library -- who took out four books last fall.
“They were checked out on her library card back in October,” said Ann Dallair, Millbury Library Director.
As a member of the CWMARS (Central and Western Massachusetts Automated Resource Sharing) library consortium, Millbury automatically renews borrowed items, such that they can be checked out for a total of six weeks.
But when that six week mark arrived, the four books never came back -- which prompted CWMARS to send out a request for the books -- or enough money (about $70) to cover them.
At that point, the patron sent an email back.
“She clearly stated that she had no intention of returning these items,” Dallair said. “As she doesn’t believe that these items belong, as she would quote, unquote say, in a children’s library.”
The four books all deal with LGBT issues -- and none were shelved in the children’s section of the Millbury Library. In fact, all were shelved in the young adult section -- physically distant from the children’s area.
But the libraries are fighting back there is pushback to these censorship attempts, New York Public Library started to,
New York Public Library makes banned books available for free
NPR
By Deepa Shivaram
April 15, 2022
In response to the more than 1,500 books challenged to be removed from libraries in the last year, the New York Public Library launched an effort to make some banned books available for everyone — for free.The initiative is called Books for All and allows any reader aged 13 and older to access commonly banned books through the library's app until the end of May. There are no wait times to access the books and no fines, the library said. Typically, access to books at the New York Public Library are only available to New Yorkers with a library card.
"The recent instances of both attempted and successful book banning —primarily on titles that explore race, LGBTQ+ issues, religion, and history — are extremely disturbing and amount to an all-out attack on the very foundation of our democracy," said Tony Marx, president of the New York Public Library.
As the NPR article states, it is not just us that they are attacking but also books about non-Christian religions and books about Black history. As one person said that the white mommies don’t want their children to learn mommy is a bigot. Time said,
All this is no accident. Conservative advocacy groups, legal organizations and state legislatures have mounted a campaign to weaponize the teaching of critical race theory, driven by a belief that fighting it will be a winning electoral message. It’s hard to predict the issue’s potency at the ballot box. But a June Economist/YouGov poll showed that although only about a third of respondents had a good idea of what CRT was, most people who knew about it had an unfavorable opinion.
This is for votes and donations from the far right Christian religions who are against anybody, anything that are different from them.
State Department of Education says books referenced critical race theory, common core, social emotional learningClick on OrlandoBy Amanda CastroApril 16, 2022Dozens of math textbooks were rejected by the Florida Department of Education after officials said their publishers were attempting to indoctrinate students.
According to an FDOE news release Friday, the department did not initially include 54 of the 132 submitted textbooks on the state’s adopted list.
The department states 41% of the submitted textbooks included references to critical race theory, common core and social emotional learning. The state said grades K-5 had the most materials rejected.[…]Orange County Classroom Teachers Association President Wendy Doromal said she was baffled after learning about the rejected textbooks.
“I’d really love to see some of these rejected books and see what they highlighted and found disturbing in those books,” Doromal said. “Certainly in a math book, I can’t imagine what he’s talking about.”
This comes as PEN America, an advocacy group for writing professionals, found Florida is third in the nation for the most incidents of school book ban incidents.
“To trans people everywhere — especially trans kids, never forget that you are seen, you are loved, and you matter” — Gov. Kate Brown in a March 31 tweetThe Register-GuardBy Ty WarrenApril 17, 2022On March 31, National Trans Day of Visibility, Gov. Kate Brown issued a statement supporting the transgender community. Her simple and kind words, greatly appreciated within my household, appeared on social media and garnered some attention. The comments in these forums were largely positive and supportive of the trans community, but many people reacted negatively, some vehemently so.Strewn among the latter comments was this cringeworthy groaner: “ok groomer.”[…]I should know better than to read the comments, but anti-trans, anti-gay sentiment exists in more potent circles than the comments section. Usage of the word “groomer,” ugly and fallacious, has risen in conservative news circles that support anti-LGBTQ legislation. This word marks its target as an enabler of the most perverse forms of child abuse. Lobbing it at someone basely accuses them of being a pedophile.“Groomer” has a pernicious and ignoble history of being weaponized against the queer community. Opponents of LGBTQ rights have long attempted to portray the gay and trans communities as predators of children. It is a false but powerful fear-invoking trope that works, so the re-emergence of “groomer” as a contemporary political tactic comes as no surprise.Supporters of HB 1557 (the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill), which passed recently in Florida, fervently use such language. Florida Press Secretary Christina Pushaw wrote in a now-deleted tweet: “If you are against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer, or… don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.”Under the pretense of protecting innocent children from inappropriate content, this law rekindles repugnant falsehoods about the LGBTQ community. To supporters of such legislation, the mere representation of gay and trans people implies “grooming” children. Currently, there are hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills in the U.S.
Language matters. Using words like “groomer” to attack the support systems and allies of gay and trans kids — the most marginalized and at-risk group of youth in the U.S. — strategically invokes false narratives and irrational fears. By intention, such language dehumanizes the LGBTQ population and its allies, but also reflects poorly on the author. Use of the word “groomer” to justify anti-LGBTQ legislation highlights ignorance, fear and cynical politics; real kids get tossed under the proverbial bus under the guise of protecting them from “groomers.”
“Do you identify as a homosexual or have you ever had same-sex sexual relations?”
The Lavender Scare not only broke up and quieted the cities’ queer communities who were afraid of federal employment discrimination and potential hate crime, but it also resulted in a largely conservative, homogenous culture within the government. While most federal organizations overturned their policies on LGBT discrimination, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and National Security Alliance (NSA)’s bans on homosexuals lasted into the 1990s, until they were officially overturned by President Bill Clinton in 1995. Later, as recent as 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry apologized to the LGBT community on behalf of the federal government’s Lavender Scare interrogations, stating: “I apologize to those who were impacted by the practices of the past and reaffirm the department’s steadfast commitment to diversity and inclusion for all our employees, including members of the LGBTI community.”
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