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| Hearsay: |
Welcome to Texas…. er… Toronto? Well, Yanks, have your knowing laugh. You deserve it. You take a lot of shit from me and when it’s time to throw it back, I promise I won’t duck or dodge. Splat. A Toronto-area school board has pulled Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy because someone complained they promote aetheism.
“(The complaint) came out of interviews that Philip Pullman had done, where he stated that he is an atheist and that he supports that,” said Scott Millard, the board’s manager of library services.
“Since we are an educational institution, we want to be able to evaluate the material; we want to make sure we have the best material for students.”
Following a recent Star story about the series, an internal memo was sent to elementary principals that said “the book is apparently written by an atheist where the characters and text are anti-God, anti-Catholic and anti-religion.”
Millard said if students want the books, they can ask librarians for them but the series won’t be on display until a committee review is complete.
ITEM! We can be as ignorant and paranoid as the worst slackjawed counties of the US of A. There, I said it.
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November 22nd, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Welcome to the asylum, Canada.
November 22nd, 2007 at 12:49 pm
I can hardly see why promoting atheism is worthy of censorship. If anything, the reverse should be true.
November 22nd, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Oh, it’s a Catholic School Board. Why do have those again? Isn’t it the 21st Century already?
November 22nd, 2007 at 3:36 pm
I’m sure Catholic school boards produce more atheists than Philip Pullman.
November 22nd, 2007 at 6:25 pm
That’s how I got here.
November 22nd, 2007 at 6:34 pm
If Ontarians really wanted an atheist society, they would have elected John Tory premier in the last election and endorsed his scheme for the public funding of faith-based schools. (Nyuk, nyuk nyuk!)
November 22nd, 2007 at 8:58 pm
What’s truly amusing about this article is this interjection–”soon to be a Hollywood blockbuster starring Nicole Kidman.” Seems to suggest that the book’s removal from the shelf is extra ridiculous now that it’s been legitimized by a movie adaptation.
This sort of thing goes on all the time in Canada. Take an amble over to Freedomtoread.ca and check out the challenged books list.
November 22nd, 2007 at 9:40 pm
There’s an article in this month’s Atlantic called “How Hollywood Saved God,” about the film adaptation’s de-atheismization.
November 23rd, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Doesn’t a Catholic school board have the right to pull a series that is blatantly opposed to their core beliefs?
November 23rd, 2007 at 3:59 pm
It took one one complaint to get a book pulled off
the shelf? Sweet! I’m heading to the library to complain
about everything written by Dan Brown!
November 23rd, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Actually, Brad, they really shouldn’t be pulling this book. If you pull a book because it might convert kids to atheism just with them having read it, it kind of makes it look like you have a bit of a loser religion. Seriously, who wants to believe in a god who’s threatened by just one (okay, in this case a three) children’s book? It sends the wrong message.
November 23rd, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Considering their old “Jews killed the son of God” position, or their concordat with Hitler, the Pullman thing looks like mercifully small potatoes as far as “sending the wrong message” goes. If anything they’ve lightened up. Allow them the odd book-banning, I say: it’s in their nature. The era of Late Catholicism is bound to produce such phenomena.
November 24th, 2007 at 11:17 am
It’s probably worth noting, for non-Ontarians, that the Catholic school boards of Ontario are funded by the provincial government, for obscure constitutional reasons.
November 26th, 2007 at 9:38 am
The reasons aren’t actually obscure. It’s because those schools existed in 1867. Essentially, the Gov’t permitted the Franco Ontariens to keep their religion while trouncing their language.
November 26th, 2007 at 9:57 am
In Quebec the two school boards were transformed from Catholic and Protestant to French and English with nary a murmur. But in Ontario the Constitutional process for getting religion out of public schools will be more complicated, since we already have French schools…
November 26th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
… and have had them since the 70’s, after the provincial law that made them illegal was finally overturned.
November 26th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Wasn’t the dual system in Ontario born out of political divisions imported from the Isles? That is, English and Scottish Protestants wishing to divide their chilren from Irish Catholic immigrants? Can an expert fill us in?
November 26th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
D’Arcy McGee. He’d be the expert. But he got shot in the back by a fellow Irish Catholic for his pains.
November 26th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Whoever said Canadian history was boring?