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| Hearsay: |
Here in Canada it’s something of a intellectual national sport to watch and cry as American school boards tuck tail and run from the complaints of fundamentalist Christian parents–banning books to match some sick image of wholesomeness that the average lunchroom table conversation in the same school will debunk. It’s like watching bad television. You’re appalled, but cannot look away.
Yet, we have our own pockets of idiots capitulating to other idiots here. Take Peel Region for instance. Not only is it a stinking industrial wasteland suburb of Toronto where jetfuel and ozone are sure to breed a race of twisted Morlock children, it’s also a bastion intolerance and ignorance.
Peel’s Catholic board has pulled the award-winning novel Snow Falling on Cedars from high school library shelves after one parent complained about its sexual content.
Officials say they have not banned the 1995 novel, but that it won’t be accessible to students until a review by a board committee is complete.
The novel, which won the PEN/Faulkner award and the American Booksellers Association book of the year award, contains a few explicit passages, including a detailed description of a married couple’s first sexual encounter, as well as sexual relations between two youths.
Snow Falling on the Cedars?!? I … I can’t even begin… I’ll let commentator Shari Graydon from the article get the last word. She could have a job here at Bookninja with comments like this: “Removing thoughtful fiction from the school library is like taking mashed potatoes out of the cafeteria when the problem is french fries at McDonald’s.”
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January 31st, 2007 at 9:25 am
Well…we delight and accept gag orders and news blackouts in
courtrooms why not teach the kids that censorship is a good thing early
in life so they don’t turn into unaccepting pricks like me yelling
about everything. Put valium and birth control pills in their utility
belts it’s ok. Isn’t happiness better? I mean look at the company one
can keep. When I think of the needless risks I use to take smuggling Robert Crumb comics from the US to Canada…sheesh.
January 31st, 2007 at 9:41 am
Tess Kalinowski reports that the school board must create a review committee to determine the fate of the novel and that the committee might render its decision in as short a time as two weeks.
Well! That would be right on the eve of Freedom to Read Week, which starts in Canada on February 25. Wouldn’t the school board look silly if it withdrew a novel from kids’ hands just before Freedom to Read Week?
January 31st, 2007 at 9:52 am
One whole parent complained? My. It must have been that very important parent who volunteers to do lunchroom, organizes the pizza lunch fundraiser and who stays every day to do attendance keeping.
January 31st, 2007 at 9:31 pm
According to the CBC News, the school board decided to review the appropriateness of the novel after a trustee received–are you ready for this?–”an anonymous letter sent … just before Christmas that the board believes came from a parent.”
The complainant apparently didn’t even have the guts to sign his or her name. The school board isn’t even sure whether the complainant has a child in their school district. But the letter triggered a review of the novel all the same.
Source: “Prize-winning novel pulled from school shelves” (Wednesday, January 31, 2007, 10:09 AM ET)
February 1st, 2007 at 10:22 am
“The complainant apparently didn’t even have the guts to sign his or her name”
that’s also true of a lot comments right here.