My (very liberal) local school district banned English teachers from teaching any book that contained the n-word, even at a high-school level, and even when the author was a black person talking about real events that happened to them.
FWIW, this was after complaints involving Of Mice and Men being on the curriculum.
Almost everybody in that book is an awful person, especially the most 'upstanding' of types. Even the protagonist is an awful person. The one and only exception is 'N* Jim' who is the only kind-hearted and genuinely decent person in the book. It's an entire story about how the appearances of people, and the reality of those people, are two very different things.
It being banned for using foul language, as educational outcomes continue to deteriorate, is just so perfectly ironic.
* https://abcnews.go.com/US/conservative-liberal-book-bans-dif...
* https://www.commondreams.org/news/book-banning-2023
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...
However, from around 2010, there has been increasingly illiberal movement from the political Left in the US, which plays out at a more local level. My "vibe" is that it's not to the degree that it is on the Right, but bigger than the numbers suggest because librarians are more likely to stock e.g. It's Perfectly Normal at a middle school than something offensive to the left.
1: I'm up for suggestions for a better term; there is a scale here between putting absurd restrictions on school librarians and banning books outright. Fortunately the latter is still relatively rare in the US, despite the mistitling on the Wikipedia page you linked.
There are a bizarrely large number similar book as Gender Queer being published, which creates the numeric discrepancy. The irony is that if there was an equal but opposite to that book about straight sex, sexuality, associated kinks, and so forth - then I think both liberals and conservatives would probably be all for keeping it away from schools. It's solely focused on sexuality, is quite crude, illustrated, targeted towards young children, and there's no moral beyond the most surface level writing which is about coming to terms with one's sexuality.
And obviously coming to terms with one's sexuality is very important, but I really don't think books like that are doing much to aid in that - especially when it's targeted at an age demographic that's still going to be extremely confused, and even moreso in a day and age when being different, if only for the sake of being different, is highly desirable. And given the nature of social media and the internet, decisions made today may stay with you for the rest of your life.
So for instance about 30% of Gen Z now declare themselves LGBT. [2] We seem to have entered into an equal but opposite problem of the past when those of deviant sexuality pretended to be straight to fit into societal expectations. And in many ways this modern twist is an even more damaging form of the problem from a variety of perspectives - fertility, STDs, stuff staying with you for the rest of your life, and so on. Let alone extreme cases where e.g. somebody engages in transition surgery or 1-way chemically induced changes which they end up later regretting.
[1] - https://archive.org/details/gender-queer-a-memoir-by-maia-ko...
[2] - https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/nearly-30-gen-z-adu...
> About half of the Gen Z adults who identify as LGBTQ identify as bisexual,
So that means ~15% of those surveyed are not attracted to the opposite sex (there’s more nuance to this statement but I imagine this needs to stay boilerplate), more or less, which is a big distinction. That’s hardly alarming and definitely not a major shift. We have also seen many cultures throughout history ebb and flow in their expression of bisexuality in particular.
> There are a bizarrely large number similar book as Gender Queer being published, which creates the numeric discrepancy.
This really needs a source. And what makes it “bizarrely large”? How does it stack against, say, the number heterosexual romance novels?
> We seem to have entered into an equal but opposite problem of the past when those of deviant sexuality pretended to be straight to fit into societal expectations.
I really tried to give your comment a fair shake but I stopped here. We are not going to have a productive conversation. “Deviant sexuality” come on man.
Anyway it doesn’t change the fact that the book banning movement is largely a Republican/conservative endeavor in the US. The numbers clearly bear it out.
